


Second Circle

by cognomen



Series: Pilot Superstition [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Complete, Fluff, Injury Recovery, Jedi Training, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-09 04:51:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5526023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>There's time, after Starkiller Base is destroyed and the rest of the universe unalterably changed, for both sides to re-gather. Kylo Ren was missing, according to their sources, but it was too good to figure that was permanent. Poe supposes that's an even trade - he'll take it because Finn is still breathing , too. Still recovering, if the doctors can be trusted. Still sunk deep in his own mind. </i><br/> </p>
<p>In which Finn is still easy to talk to, even when he doesn't talk back.  A series of visits by a series of friends.  A slowly developing set of relationships. In which I explore a whole variety of characters. Spoilers for the end of the movie, so read AFTER seeing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> -BB-8, when referred to in dialogue, is phonetically transformed to 'BeeBee-Ate', as this is how they do it in the official publications (the novelization and _Before the Awakening_. I'm not sure I'm crazy about it but I find it easier to follow the leads given!

There's time, after Starkiller Base is destroyed and the rest of the universe unalterably changed, for both sides to re-gather. Kylo Ren was missing, according to their sources, but it was too good to figure that was permanent. Poe supposes that's an even trade - he'll take it because Finn is still breathing , too. Still recovering, if the doctors can be trusted. Still sunk deep in his own mind. 

The resistance bought a retreat in good order with their victory, but it's still a retreat. It sours the mood a little. The First Order has sights on them now for sure - singular, narrow focus, long range target sights. Possibly they don't have such an absolute reach anymore, but it is still long, still a massive power that will come to bear on the known location of their base. Time to leave Q'Dar. Poe's used to packing up and leaving.

There's an art to it, like getting out of someone else's bunk the next morning in the same clothes as yesterday - or considerably fewer clothes if yesterday's could not be located - and arriving where you belonged unobserved.

He doesn't own enough to get caught with his pants down in the event of more evacuation. Nothing that won't fit under the dash of his T-70 between his boots. Nothing except BB-8, more friend than baggage anyway, that couldn't be replaced.

"If pilots are allowed to indulge in superstition, and we are," Poe tells Finn. "Mine is 'don't get attached', right? What's a few pairs of orange underwear anyway?"

Finn hasn't been very talkative since they'd scraped him up off Starkiller base and brought him here - Poe had missed the entire victory celebration when he'd seen Chewbacca carry the still form out of the Millennium Falcon and a sea of arms lifting to get Finn onto the medical transport. He'd followed him all the way to the infirmary, and been ushered out by the medical staff after several admonishments about hovering that he was pretty sure were unwarranted.

He was stable, but the Senate was still out on whether he might be able to hear Poe but not answer. It's okay.

He's pretty good at holding up one sided conversations. He's had a few with General Organa this week too. Maybe not _quite_ this one-sided. 

Pretty close. She had a lot to grieve. She'd said, in a distracted afterthought, that she hoped Poe was still writing to his parents. That it was the worst thing to know someone you cared about was out there in the universe, and to _know_ they were in danger but not how much.

Poe didn't have the heart to remind her that his mother had died when he was nine. Leia had known her. He'd called his father, though, straight away. 

Kes Dameron had listened, with guarded expression, to news of the victory. Poe supposes it's an old story to him.

"So I told my dad I met someone," Poe says, to see if there's any reaction. No good. _Well, worth a shot._ "Actually, he guessed."

Poe summons up his best impression of his father's age-roughened but still military bark. "'I know that look, Poe Dameron.' Hard _not_ to admit it after that. I think this is the first time I've admitted an interest to my dad before said interest."

It's strange to admit. There's still no reaction. It's a tough room.

The medical field tells him that everything remains at least as stable as yesterday. Poe is not entirely certain where the next stop is, which secret alcove the resistance will put itself away into next, but he hopes distantly for a jungle. 

"Don't tell anybody this," Poe says, reaching out to cover the dark brown finger with his own - they're pretty cold. Poe pulls the blanket a little higher. "But without a bunch of trees and dense foliage around, I feel pretty exposed."

He pauses, leaves a beat for the pacing of the joke. "Not that I ever much minded exposing myself."

His best charm goes sailing by, and Poe supposes he deserves it. He hears BB-8 rolling up the hall, calling out inquisitively for him, and knows this visit will be over soon. Poe tucks Finn's now warmer hand under the blanket at his side, and gets up, his knees protesting straightening again after being folded for so long.

-

"Once I took on three star destroyers in a luxury yacht starship," Poe boasts. It's easier to inflate stories when the listener couldn't call _bantha poodoo_. It's actually the first time he's gotten to tell this story - anyone who would care was there with him, in RapierSquadron.

"I guess it actually wasn't that long ago. Less than a cycle," Poe admits. "I wonder if it caused a big First Order fuss - how do you lose a luxury yacht when you've got three star destroyers? Well, _I_ was flying it, that's how."

Why be modest? BB-8, shifting anxiously at his side - the droid now has even _less_ desire to be more than two feet away from him at any time - makes an anxious noise, requesting clarification. At least _someone_ is listening to his story.

"No, I wasn't alone," Poe assures BB-8. "Iolo and Karé were there."

A scolding sound.

"Well, they weren't in the _yacht_ ," Poe clarifies, exasperated.

He gives BB-8 a look, and the droid returns his reproach without a single waver in the dark lense trained on him.

_Never get into a stare-off with a droid._

"Okay," Poe clarifies, "with the support and cover of Rapier Squadron I took on three-"

A chirp.

"I _ran away_ from, after out maneuvering..." Poe tries. This passes. "Three First Order cruisers. It doesn't sound as intense as it really was that way."

BB-8 regards him with a steady lense, but no voiced protest. 

"I'm trying to look good for an audience here, BeeBee-Ate," Poe tells the droid. It doesn't gain him any immediate sympathy but BB-8 swings attention toward Finn's deeply breathing form, and then inquires.

"I don't know if he can hear us," Poe includes BB-8 by habit - the droid was usually quiet but almost always there when Poe was. "But I'd hate to find out he could and we just left him alone in the silence the whole time."

Burbling a series of conversational beeps, BB-8 shifts back and forth just a little, expectant.

" _And_ I like a captive audience," Poe agrees, if only so he'll hear the end of it. "Yes, BeeBee-Ate. Can I finish the story now, or would you like to do it for me?"

BB-8, looking smugly satisfied in the way of droids, croons permissively for Poe to finish.

-

"I hear that she made it," Poe announces, at the end of the first week in space. "Where, I'm not completely sure. But Chewbacca came back. I guess that means they found Luke. Great right? Hate to think we'd gone through all that for an old map."

He hesitates, thinking about Luke Skywalker. About once - when he was very little, but just old enough to remember - his father had lifted Poe on his shoulders in the middle of a massive crowd on Yavin-4 so he could see over their heads to the heroes of the New Republic. At the time, he could still hold his mother's hand - she'd squeezed his fingers tight, and pointed with her other outstretched hand, naming the figures on the stage. He remembers his father leaning down so Poe could hear her.

 _That was Luke Skywalker_ , she'd said, _and Leia Organa. Han Solo._ Names from the stories they'd tell him - clean of the agony Poe now knows is a part of war as inseparably as differing ideals - at night before bed. Maybe they should have known better. Maybe Poe could have stayed at the settlement with his father and forgotten his inborn and inherited wanderlust.

Probably not.

"So I guess that means she'll come back with Luke," he says. "Or whatever the plan is, now."

Poe scrubs his hand through his tightly controlled hair, leaning back in the chair that doesn't move between his visits to Finn's bedside. There's another one facing, but no one ever sits in it - he just puts his feet up on the seat. He watches the readouts of Finn's medical chamber tick by. Slow and steady. Poe knows the medical coma is because - as the doctor has assured him - they'd had to undo a lot of the cauterization made by the lightsaber blade in order to coax the wound to heal normally so Finn would regain full functionality in - pretty much everything. Because of how immense the pain would be, it is kinder just to let him sleep while he heals. 

That's the theory. Poe's not sure how he'll feel to wake up in another system with Rey gone. At least this time she was gone of her own volition. He takes a deep breath and sighs it out, letting his hand trail down over the smooth surface of the sphere housing BB-8's gyros absently, trying to pick up the trail of his thoughts again.

"They used to tell stories, you know - fighting the Empire. It seemed pretty amazing. When you're little you don't think that it's like - well, what it's like, right? You know," Poe says. No answer. He looks down at the contrast of his dusky fingers against the dinged white paint, mouth running on before his thoughts catch up. "You'd hear how they faced down a whole squad of Stormtroopers - I'd convinced myself they were all just hollow suits-"

He stops abruptly. 

"Sorry," he tells Finn, getting up. BB-8 nudges against his thigh, trying to get out of the way of the hurried, unexpected motion. "Guess I'm just too introspective to be a good conversation partner today."

Poe retreats from too many memories and too much consideration. He supposes he has the luxury to think of it as a tactical retreat - he'll make another sally forth in better conditions.

-

"Sad to say it's gonna be a heck of a scar, buddy," Poe tells Finn, still unresponsive. "People like that though. _I_ like that, if you care."

A pause. BB-8 rocks a little at his side, encouraging. Poe thinks it won't be this easy to tell Finn when he's awake, but the practice won't hurt. He hitches his black and orange flight helmet up against his side. 

"Be nice if you'd wake up and tell me," Poe says. he still has hope - a lot of it - but time is stretching out behind them. He barely knows Rey - they'd met when the maps had been made whole, and she'd left an impression. She's been gone longer than expected.

"You'd wake up for Rey. Everyone wakes up for the Jedi."

He waits and the nothing continues. Poe doesn't really mind.

"The medics say you could wake up any time now," Poe reminds him, as if it might just be stubbornness that holds him to silence and sleep now. "Or that you could never wake up. What kind of odds are those?"

BB-8 doesn't hesitate to calculate and tell Poe, though at least the tone is quiet.

Poe Gives BB-8 a look. "I wasn't actually _asking_ the odds."

The droid looks unrepentant. Poe supposes that's a trait he can blame himself for.

"So, I don't wanna miss it when you wake up," Poe says. "Nobody wants to wake up after almost dying alone in some strange infirmary. On a whole other planet, even."

Nothing, not even a twitch. Well it's not the first time Poe hasn't gotten what he wants.

"Listen, buddy, I gotta fly a mission."

The helmet's in his lap already, the orange flight suit already donned. He'd found himself with a few extra moments before launch and nothing better to do with himself.

Maybe he'd hoped, a little, for a miracle of good timing. For the Force to do him a favor. He gets up and puts the helmet on, looking at Finn through the yellow-tinted visor and makes a decision. 

"Don't worry, though. BeeBee-Ate will stay with you," Poe promises.

BB-8 shrills a protest and rolls into the back of Poe's knees. Looking down, Poe sees the dark lense trained up on him in clear disapproval.

Poe crouches, and puts his hands on either side of BB-8's magnetically levitating head to hold the droid's attention. He turns on the charm. 

"I know it's dangerous out there," Poe says. "But this is important, right? you think Rey would want him to wake up alone either? We got a job. We gotta take care of him. And it's never a good idea to make a Jedi mad, right?" 

Considering the prospect for a moment, BB-8 affirms with a slow beep. Poe thumps the droid in gentle affection. "So take care of Finn, and if he wakes up, tell him it's about damn time."

BB-8 makes him promise to take the best of the backup astromech droids, and to be extra careful. 

Poe gives his word, hoping he can keep it.

-


	2. Chapter 2

"Sorry I sent your company away," Leia tells the quiet, still figure on the infirmary bed. "We need everybody right now." 

She pauses, not liking the diplomatic sound of the words in her own voice, looking down at the droid guarding the bedside. It belongs to Poe, she knows. BB-8 had come along when Poe joined, a recruit by default. Leia hates to see halves of partnerships laying around.

Especially these days when she feels like half of a lot of things. Why is she here? She pauses and gathers herself. Distraction is a luxury she can't afford. "Not that we don't _always_ need everybody."

No response. How did people do this? At least, when she'd pried Han out of that carbonite, he'd still been talkative. The memory doesn't bring a smile. None do, these days. 

"Every time you send someone out," she explains - the silence feels like it demands an explanation though she has no other obligation to do so. "You have to forget you know anything about them but how qualified they are. That means forgetting an awful lot about Poe Dameron, and more times than I like to admit."

She finds herself sitting in a vacant chair by the bedside, settling down before she thinks about it. Why not? Nothing has detonated in the five minutes she's used to see to this part of her duties. Until something _does_ \- and knowing the luck the resistance has it won't be too long - she can stay and keep a hero company.

"I'm glad to know that maybe somewhere in the he first order, there are others who might question what they're doing," she says. "As it happens, I think it's important to feel bad about fighting and killing your enemy. Not in the heat of the moment. Then, you just survive. But if afterward, you can't even wonder who was under all that insignia, what they were when you weren't looking at them, under all that black...

"If you forget that, maybe that's when you become the enemy yourself."

She realizes it's more words than she's put together in a little while. Finn's silence is permissive, but it's is not overly consoling. That's refreshing. Leia can hardly get a word out without someone apologizing to her. She's as tired of it as she is heartsick.

"Anyway," she allows, letting her guard down for just one moment. "Because everything is so uncertain, I thought I'd say thank you."

She pauses, leaning back. These chairs - spares dug up from some auxiliary closet somewhere - are not comfortable. The seats are too hard, too flat, and the backs just shy of being an acute angle, encouraging either ramrod straight posture or slouching of the highest magnitude.

"I'll say it again when you wake up," she assures Finn. "Don't worry about missing your opportunity, but - thank you, Finn."

BB-8 beeps a warning, just before Leia detects the shuffling steps and audible worrying of C-3PO's approach on her own. She gets up.

"Oh! General, here you are," no matter what C-3PO says, he always manages to sound a hair shy of losing it. "I'm terribly sorry to interrupt-"

Leia cuts him off. "Threepio, do you remember Cloud City?"

C-3PO utters an overly dramatic and broken gasp. "How _could_ I ever forget that dreadful place?"

Leia precedes him out of the room. "The next time you apologize to me, I'll see to it you get the same view of your own backside."

She doesn't mean it. _Mostly_.

"Oh, I'm-" C-3PO catches himself. "Of course, General Organa, I perfectly understand."

-

BB-8 has long, practical vigils at Finn's bedside. After a day or two, hardly anyone notices the presence in the infirmary. Care is taken both by the medics who come to attend to the variety of messy human functions and by BB-8 to work around each other.

Other people come and go. BB-8 stays, remembering what Poe had said - Finn could wake up any time now. BB-8 would like to be there for that. 

It's unlikely, as BB-8 measures the slow rate of Finn's respiratory function and decreased heart rate to be those more typically indicative of deep sleep. 

BB-8 wonders if he's dreaming. Poe has described this phenomenon, but BB-8 can't fully sympathize with it. The extraneous imagery a droid takes in over a day - or over the course of function - are simply filtered for importance and after a suitable time to be certain, discarded. The delay was for organic beings, who sometimes discovered things were important after they had happened. 

Irregardless, BB-8 has no need to dream, but it is an item of curiosity. Poe has described it as either a pleasing diversion or an item of distress. Though none of the signs BB-8 Sees when Poe is dreaming manifest, BB-8 hopes that Finn is having the pleasant kind of dream. 

When Finn's stasis is over, BB-8 hopes he feels refreshed. Finn was good at adventures. He didn't seem to like them as much as Poe, but in a small, secret place, BB-8 wishes Poe would have a few less adventures. 

It's no good suggesting that, though.

For a moment, BB-8 registers a change in heart rate and rolls forward to the bedside, giving Finn's hand a gentle nudge and calling out a cheerful inquiry - but it seems like he's not ready yet after all. There's no response.

Briefly, BB-8 considers running through Poe's alarm routine - a cacophony of lights and intense music along with an avoidance routine that required Poe to catch BB-8 to turn it off.

In the end, BB-8 decides Finn has earned the rest.

-

On another planet, a vast green and ocean place where there is water everywhere but most of it is salt, Rey thinks of Finn. Her arms hurt from supporting her own weight and Luke Skywalker is not the most talkative of co-inhabitants.

Rey's only heard a few words in his rusty voice since her arrival - mostly 'do as you see' and 'patience' - the latter seems to be his favorite. Rey is beginning to hate it.

More surprisingly, though it's hardly unusual in her life, she's beginning to hate silence more. She'd gotten used to not spending her evenings with nothing but the desert animal calls for company, and her days alone with her thoughts and working until she was exhausted. It's too painful to think about Han Solo yet. every time she does, Skywalker seems to _know_ somehow. He appears with some new strenuous task.

Today it was to go down all of the steps - ancient stone half consumed by the wild of the planet and sometimes slick and treacherous (those two words put her in mind of someone, too, and turn her thoughts to anger, cloud her mind until she feels her numb fingers slip in sea-spray and she calls her focus back) on her hands. 

Rey takes it slow. It's agony by the middle, all her muscles screaming and every individual pulse of he heart is fighting gravity to get blood to her extremities. She doesn't need hate - she needs strength. That's when her thoughts turn to her friends. She has no memory of any she had before Jakku. It's alright. She can think of Finn and BB-8, and with a sort of tentative promise of friendship, the pilot Poe Dameron.

"So," she says aloud to herself, through gritted teeth - it's easier to speak out loud, and it's not as if there's anyone to hear her. Skywalker had left her alone to her task and she can smell dinner cooking somewhere on the island. "Remember how you told me - _when_ you told me..."

She trails off for a tricky bit, balancing on one hand with her legs slightly scissored to make stillness easier, and wipes her wet hand on her dangling shirt to give her better traction. Rey repeats the motion with her other hand.

"You told me you were a stormtrooper, and that no one had ever looked at you like I did?"

The next few steps are slow, careful agony. She can hear the water roaring against the cliffs below like a hungry animal and the answering thirsty echo in her soul to drink water. To _be_ water.

"Well, I should have told you then that no one ever looked at me like _you_ did, either."

It's just Rey's voice alone and the surf, and though she'd lived on a desert planet she isn't sure she's ever sweat this much. Her hair is sticking to her face, her palms are already wet again. She's not at the water line yet but her muscles already feel on the verge of liquid.

She uses it. At the moment of most extreme duress, Rey can feel the surging water as more than just vibration in the rock she's touching. For a moment, there's so much in kindred with the pounding surf that she can welcome it in, pull the energy and momentum from the waves. They don't mind; what Rey needs is so very little and though she feels like she could take more - _so_ much more - there's a thought in her mind about pulling something bigger than she is into herself. 

Rey takes enough to get her to the bottom of the stairs, though she more falls down the last dozen steps, casting herself over onto the grass and settling for skidding head first down the last stretch to the beach, laughing because she's too exhausted to do anything else and because - for just a moment - she'd _done_ it.

She'd called the force on _command_.

Rey slips into the water at the bottom of the path without even bothering to take her clothes off - it's freezing, salty and buoyant - but she's so hot and tired from the exercise that even the cold is welcome. For a time, she floats, letting the water rock and carry her, drifting and weightless, on cold shoulders. The concept of going back up the stairs feels very far away. She's exhausted. She might as well try to climb out of the atmosphere and into the galaxy. 

Rey's mind drifts - and then finds a harmonic resonance with the water surrounding her, dropping down and down and then her consciousness expands out into all the reaches of the ocean, into the chasms at the core of the planet and then through, dropping her out amongst the stars themselves and into the places where dark matter lives. The moments between breaths falling away to infinite time. It's terrifying and exhilarating and Rey almost tears loose into it.

Something familiar sparks up against her awareness, a memory of warm dark fingers wrapped around her own and her heart pounding, and then her thoughts brush up against something that feels just like that - and that recognizes her in the instant she recognizes ( _remembers that she's more than just a drifting existence reaching out into the universe and being borne aloft_ ) it, it recognizes her.

Rey snaps back into herself in a terrifying rush - she is shivering, the sun is setting, and her fingertips have wrinkles from too long in the water. She has heard of the phenomenon but doesn't remember ever seeing it. 

Luke Skywalker with a gnarled old staff in hand watches her from the edge of the water with something unreadable in his eyes.

"I did it," Rey tells him, victoriously. "I felt the force. I called to it, and - and I could feel Finn out there!"

She splashes her way back to shore, sodden and shivering, grinning in a half-wild way. "I felt him wake up!"

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Yes I deliberately avoid gendering BB-8. The novels use 'he' and several lines in dialog in the film also use 'he' but honestly I think it's extraneous and more indicative of a fond attachment on the part of the speakers than any requirement of a droid to have gender at all. I do also avoid using 'it' in direct reference to BB-8. For this reason, BB-8's section may read a little more difficultly than the others for which I apologize.


	3. Chapter 3

It's a rare moment of quiet in the depths of the night, when the lights are low in the infirmary to let the patients sleep.

Finn doesn't feel too confused - there's some time-line held up in his thoughts as if through a cloudy lense, a thin thread but he can hold it - that makes it seem _right_ when he wakes up in the half-dark infirmary.

BB-8, waiting nearby with a steady red light next to the dark lense of the camera eye, croons softly, inquisitively, and rolls forward. Finn, for all he's been resting too long already is still exhausted. He manages to answer the beeped query by slipping his hand out from under the sheet and offering the droid a conspiratorial thumbs-up.

BB-8, fairly wobbling in place with barely contained excitement cracks open one of the tool ports and extends an upturned welding torch, lit blue with a low gas-hiss of approval.

-

"Well, that's a warm welcome," Poe says, returning sometime later with his helmet still in hand. He'd flown a wide patrol, a week-long perimeter to check in on the whole fleet and a variety of auxiliary bases. The resistance is spread out for safety, though that makes communications more difficult. He's come straight from the hangar, unable to resist checking in on Finn even before he takes a much-wanted shower.

Poe stays back far enough that his last long stretch in the cockpit can't offend Finn's newly awakened nose. "You sure you should be up already?"

Finn looks up, and it's a little tired and hollow, but he brightens up for Poe like they're the last two people in the galaxy.

"Well, I've been laying down this whole time, so I thought it was about time for change of pace," Finn says. "Plus, BeeBee-Ate won't let me sleep more than eight hours at a stretch."

BB-8 beeps and whirrs out a proud agreement, practically beaming up at Poe.

"That's _some_ alarm system," Finn says.

Poe laughs, finding humor in his own mortification. Something about this finally cements the change and progress in Finn as real in Poe's mind. Sheer pleasure unfolds somewhere behind his heart and Poe thinks it's amazing. He hadn't realized how little hope he's been allowing himself since Starkiller Base. Since before that, if he's honest with himself.

It's something that Kylo Ren - Ben, he reminds himself - tore free when he was looking for the map. Poe isn't sure - hasn't been sure - if it's just detached and rattling around inside him like the tricky bolt in his T-70's coolant system, or if it was removed entirely, leaving Poe to try and rediscover it or build it from salvage.

Yet, here it is, rolling around under Poe's feet in the heat of the moment like the bolt around the floor of his cockpit. Real and present and ready to be returned to place now that Poe has a moment and a wrench.

He pulls Finn into a tight hug, and Finn doesn't hesitate or wrinkle his nose. As strong arms squeeze over Poe's shoulders, he realizes Finn smells like he could use a real shower, too.

"So what'd I miss?" Finn asks, in a low voice at Poe's ear.

Poe steps back, still beaming. "Kinda a lot. I'll fill you in."

BB-8 rolls insistently into the back of Poe's knees, and he has to apologize for saying hello to Finn first. Giving his friend a conspiring wink, Poe crouches to greet BB-8 as well - just as glad to see his old friend as his new one.

"Hey, thanks for watching him for me," Poe tells BB-8. "I"m glad he had a friend nearby when he woke up."

BB-8 shifts gently back and forth, somewhere between pride at the praise and admonishing Poe for leaving the droid behind. Poe pats BB-8 gently, affectionately, trying to sweet-talk his way out of further scolding.

"I wouldn't have trusted anybody else."

Conveying a long string of information in a pleased tone, BB-8 tells Poe about the things that had happened on the new base while he was away - including the surprise information that General Organa herself had come to visit Finn.

"Well, I didn't miss too much then."

A chirp.

"How do you learn that?" Finn asks, still standing just behind Poe - where they'd embraced. 

"Droid?" Poe asks, craning his neck to look up.

Finn nods.

"Well," Poe says. "I just grew up around them. When it's a necessity, after a while, you get the hang of understanding each other."

"Can you teach me?" Finn asks. "They want me to stay in the infirmary for a little while longer, and I'd like to learn."

"I think BeeBee-Ate would be a a better teacher," Poe says, before he fully thinks it through. _Finn just gave you an excuse to visit as often as you can!_

He covers quickly, while Finn's expression is in the process of falling - _he really can't hide his emotions_. "But I'd love to come help, too."

Finn's expressive and handsome features - really, who would want to hide them behind a storm trooper helmet? - complete another transformation into a bright smile. Poe's heart makes a little helpless motion, a sort of hollow thunk, and he'd been right. It isn't going to be as easy to tell Finn with his intense, warm brown eyes focused on Poe like he's the only thing in the room.

Especially when his next question makes things even more difficult.

"Where's Rey, by the way?"

-

Rey is holding a lightsaber, fighting the thoughts and images that come tied to it; some residual agony of the last owner. She doesn't know the whole story, and looking both hurts and exhilarates her. The answer is _there_ \- and she thinks somehow that unlocking the riddle of Luke Skywalker is the key to all this. Even more than learning to use the force on her own.

She's seen the way he looks at her, the way his expression shields itself when he sees her looking.

He isn't what the stories say. He isn't what Han said, either - at least Rey wants to think better of him than a sad, old hermit waiting alone for the universe to forget him.

But no matter how she reaches out into the force, reaching into the echoes that lay screaming within the very molecules of the lightsaber, she can't get the images to line up any differently. Perhaps some events were so loud that they have overwritten others, or perhaps it sat locked up in a chest for so long that all of the quiet has bled into it, calming all but the brightest pain.

her reaching doesn't pull up anything new and finally, she sets the lightsaber aside. It isn't quite frustrating yet, but she's skirting her limit. Yesterday, she'd thrown the lightsaber - to other eyes probably some kind of a priceless relic of the universe - over the edge of the cliff in anger.

Luke had made her climb down the cliff face after it. It took hours. She felt better after, for all the exertion. Today, she stops before she has to repeat the exercise.

Luke Skywalker is standing behind her. Rey has learned that the Jedi code involves a lot of silent staring. 

"I'm sorry I threw your lightsaber off a cliff," she says, because it's the first thing that comes to mind. She looks up over her shoulder, and is surprised to find that Luke's usually stoic countenance is sporting a sort of sheepish grin.

"It's had longer falls," he says, giving a cryptic gesture with his robotic hand. 

"I _think_ I knew that," Rey says, chasing the sliver of knowledge in her own mind. She sits up straighter, stretching her back out. "Not that it matters. I could use it when I had to without all those negative thoughts ambushing me."

"Hmm," Luke says. Thoughtful. His idea of training moves at a pace slower than an overburdened luggabeast.

"Maybe that means we can train with the actual saber?" Rey hints. "Get back to help out before the whole war is over..."

Luke is too sharp - if slow moving - to be prodded in any direction he doesn't want to go.

"You're thinking about your friends," he says, as if it takes any real clairvoyance. 

"I'm thinking about what the First Order is going to do-"

"Revealed, your thoughts are," Luke says, smiling at is own idea of a joke. It doesn't amuse Rey at all.

_I think I liked his sister better_. She waits for him to be finished with his amusement. 

"Of course I'm thinking about my friends," she says. "I'm worried about them."

"And if you go back before you truly finish your training... before you truly understand the Force," Luke begins. It's more words than Rey's heard him string together at once before. "What is it that you'll be able to do to help out?"

Rey draws herself up straighter. "I beat Kylo Ren."

Luke lets that sit in silence until she feels the full weight of the foolishness of relying on a past, desperate, seat-of-her-pants victory to save her and the people she cares about (and the whole universe if she lets herself take it that seriously, but that's so much _pressure_ ). He doesn't, however, belittle her victory. 

Luke's expression softens. "You're not as far from your friends as it seems. I think you already know that."

She thinks of a few days earlier, of reaching out into the universe and finding Finn. She'd thought of it as just an accident, a sort of fluke.

"You mean I can reach out to them whenever? Wherever they are?" she asks, finding the prospect exciting.

"Maybe with a little more focus," Luke suggests, in good humor. Rey thinks he may be warming up to her.

-

Just a few short words, a casual query, and yet it makes Poe question himself. When it came down to it, Finn has known Rey longer - or at least been in direct contact with her for more time. Only natural he'd be worried about her - even Poe's a little concerned that Rey isn't back yet.

"She went after Luke Skywalker," Poe tells him. He wishes he could have taken a shower before explaining. All the sweat is cooling in his flight suit, leaving him clammy and cold. "We completed the map, so she and Chewbacca-"

"She just _left_ us here?" Finn demands.

"You were pretty out of commission," Poe rationalizes. He settles down into the chair he usually takes when visiting and finds that someone has changed the chairs. The new one is deep and padded and comfortable, and Poe settles down gratefully, resting his helmet on the floor at his side. "And I think the idea was that she was going to bring him back."

"But she didn't?" Finn catches on quickly.

"Chewbacca says they found Luke, which means they found the _temple_ \- and if you're going to train to be a Jedi, I guess that's as good a place as any..." Poe realizes he's rambling. There's a strange look on Finn's face.

"She did say she'd be back," Poe assures him.

"No - well, I know," Finn says, stumbling over his words a little. "I almost remember that. It's just that I swear I felt her here again, just before I woke up."

BB-8 whirrs a negative.

_They always wake up for the Jedi,_ Poe thinks. "I can't answer that one, buddy."

Finn sits down on the edge of his bed. "So what do we do now? Do we just wait?"

"With the First Order out there, bloody nosed and with a bad attitude?" Poe asks, grinning. "No, there's plenty tod o. We're still unpacking after moving base. I bet they could find something for you to do even while you're supposed to be taking it easy."

Finn looks thoughtful and just a little lost. Poe wonders how hard it is for him to get by with no orders - it can't be easy to make this transition in moments of inaction. It's easier to hesitate when nothing is chasing you. Poe doesn't feel bad for him - maybe Finn doesn't quite have his feet under himself yet but he's a strong leader. He'll make it.

"Are you saying I can join the Resistance?" Finn asks.

"Well, yeah. If that's what you want," Poe hopes it is. "We could use more people like you. If not, I can get you wherever you'd like to be. You could always go back to Jakku."

This joke hits the mark, and Finn gives him a bright, willing smile. Poe's heart makes another one of those bellyflop motions.

"Nobody," Finn says, "really wants to go back to Jakku."

BB-8 chirps an enthusiastic agreement.

" _Thank_ you," Finn tells the droid, not needing a translation. "No, I'm staying right here."

Poe is relieved, deeply.

-


	4. Chapter 4

When they let him out of the infirmary, Finn feels as listless as a ship with engines cut. The base - this time ensconced amongst dense pine foliage and in the high mountains - is sprawling and under the surface, cut into the rock itself. It's not as cold on this planet as Starkiller Base, but Finn's first steps outside - a little stir crazy from all his time in - are enough to send him back inside pretty quickly. His borrowed clothes, while appropriate for the resistance and clean, aren't enough to keep him warm on their own.

He rakes his eyes quickly over the mountains around them, green trees and covered and snow, and then a long look at the sky before he has to hug his arms against his body for warmth and head back inside. He has to find Poe's - _his_ jacket. It's his first gift ever, and he hopes it wasn't discarded. The thought of it drifting in space somewhere or left behind at the old base in a rush leaves Finn a little anxious. 

He runs into Poe -

"Hey, look who's up and around!"

\- and earns by some virtue of his actions that he's not sure of, an amiable thump on the shoulder. Poe leans close into a half embrace - Finn likes these. The touches shared here are easygoing and affectionate, worlds away from the sorts he shared with his fellow stormtroopers. It had always been mutually harsh - not always without affection, but more a test of strength than a sign of unity. Maybe both - it seems to get kind of twisted up in Finn's mind when he thinks too hard about it.

"Good to see they let you out of there," Poe continues. "Though you, uh, look a little lost."

"Have you seen my coat?"

Poe grins at him, his eyes flicking up and down over Finn as if to be sure he's still as whole today as yesterday. "Yeah. I thought it could stand a little patching up. It'll look a little different, but a new place calls for a new style anyway, right?"

"I'm sorry I let it get so beat up."

Poe shakes his head, slinging an arm over Finn's shoulders. "I'm sorry _you_ got so beat up. We only have to patch a jacket. C'mon, it should be ready."

Just like that, Finn's swept back up into a new place, into easy belonging. Poe won't let him flounder or fail, Finn thinks, and he's never had that security before.

He thinks, smiling, that he likes it.

-

 

The coat returns to Finn's possession with new, bright patches of leather covering the hole in the shoulder, bridging the rent in the back. It' snot back to perfect, and Poe can't tell if that pleases Finn or disappoints him.

"Is it okay?" Poe asks, suddenly anxious. Maybe it was to soon for Finn to see t he holes and think of anything but misery. His fingers are dak over the worn, water-stained leather where it seams against the fresh piece.

"Just surprised," Finn says. "Whenever I damaged something before, I either replaced it from requisitions or the repairs made it like new."

"I could send it back," Poe offers.

Finn pulls the jacket protectively against his chest, with a solemn shake of his head. It's such a serious gesture that Poe smiles.

"No, I like it."

"It'll make you look like a survivor," Poe says. He reaches out, compelled to touch Finn again. He can feel warmth through the thin, borrowed shirt and thanks whatever local deity that's listening for the fact the shirt is just a little too small.

"I like that," Finn says. "It's better than 'traitor'."

"It's more true, too," Poe tells him.

He thinks Finn blushes. It's very, very alluring. 

"Do you have your quarters yet?" Poe asks, casually. He knows - because he's asked - that Finn has been released by the medics.

"Uh, no," Finn admits, looking nervous.

"You need me to talk to some people? Help you get set up?" Poe offers, sounding too eager, even to his own ears.

"I'm sure you have something more important to do," Finn says, sounding uncertain.

"More important? Maybe," Poe allows. "But I _want_ to help you."

Finn eyes him uncertainly, then, slow understanding dawns on his face.

"You want an excuse," he realizes.

"I want an excuse," Poe agrees, thinking; _I want more than an excuse._

Finn's triumphant grin is a thing of beauty, bright and honest. Poe physically restrains himself from groaning. _Not suave, Dameron._ He also, with more difficulty, resists offering to let Finn bunk with him. It would be better - less coercive, if this was ever going to go anywhere (if it ever _could_ go anywhere) - if Finn was on his own two feet first. And Poe knows enough about his own struggles with self restraint to force himself to consider a path less filled with constant temptation.

Poe can resist temptation. He _can_ , even if he can almost hear BB-8 laughing at him from here. He'll talk to the droid about it later.

"I won't interfere," Poe promises. "I'll just show you where to go."

"Alright, " Finn says, smiling again. "That would be a help."

Poe leads them through the labeled - at Leia's insistence all of the maze like and winding corridors were labeled in several predominant languages - hallways, toward the quarter-master's office. 

"Do you feel a little more confident talking to droids now?" Poe asks.

"It's still hard sometimes," Fin admits. "They go so fast."

"Astromech droids have only one speed," Poe agrees. "Kinda like pilots, I guess."

Finn pulls the jacket on as they walk, and the motion is a minor miracle of fluidity after all his time healing, and laughs without pain. 

Poe walks just a little bit faster, needing the distraction.

-

When she reaches out the first time, it's frustrating. It's nothing at all like pulling strength out of the massive wells of the forces at work in the world. _That_ was easy for her, relaxing almost. All she had to do was take a deep breath and _feel_.

This is the first force-related task that has daunted her. It's like searching for a marble of one specific color in a mountain of marbles. Blindfolded. At moments, she gets close. Old connections reach out to her. Once, Rey tastes the angry thoughts of Unka Plutt - they call her in but taste bitter, stale and angry like a piece of food chewed over and over again.

She had yanked her thoughts back quickly.

Luke hadn't said anything. She wonders if he can follow along - can feel and see what she does. She knows it can connect two people, but did it? Always? Could she reach out through that thrumming line of anger and get hold of Kylo Ren, like he had once had ahold of her?

It could be useful. If she could ever find a way to direct her thoughts the way she wanted to. Now, the stillness in Rey's mind is gone and she opens her eyes. 

"For something that's supposed to be _alive_ ," she tells Luke, still sitting across from her as patiently as if they hadn't been there for several hours while she failed. "The Force requires and awful lot of sitting still."

Luke looks at her from the depths of his humorless years in pursuit of Jedi perfection.

"There's more than one aspect of the Force," Luke reminds her.

Rey sighs. "But it's all one thing. Unified. Why is the Living Force so easy, and the Cosmic Force so hard?"

"Because there's no time frame to the Cosmic Force," Luke says, trying to explain a difficult concept. It's hard for him to put words to, Rey gets it. She's not sure how she'd explain all the peaks and valleys she could feel now - the way even distant life on the planet seemed to press against her skin. She imagines it to be akin to the sensations gathered by an animal's whiskers.

Not quite as detailed as touch. Then again, it's not like that at all. Rey can't pull it in - or she can, but won't - but she has figured out how to open the doors at the depths of herself and let it come in. She considers how this could be different from the Cosmic Force, knowing better than to sit _completely_ idle while Luke looks for an explanation.

"You have many connections to the Living Force," Luke says, at length. "But only one connection to the Cosmic Force."

"What connection?" Rey asks, curious. If there was only one, she'd have to use it, rather than the familiar, alive surging power that comes ready under her reach when she pushes out the fingers of her thoughts. 

Luke gives her one of his enigmatic looks. The sort that says she'll have to search her soul to find the answer. As if living alone on Jakku for so long hadn't been enough time alone with her own thoughts.

Rey flops backward, giving up on silent meditation on the answers to the mysteries of the universe for the moment. Again, she misses her friends. She wonders how Finn is doing.

"I'm not sure this whole 'lonely Jedi path' is going to work for me," she says. 

"It's not about being lonely," Luke says; the man who has been here, alone, on this planet for _years_. "It's about focus."

"You're _really_ not going to tell me," she says.

"I'm pretty sure you'll figure it out," Luke assures her. For a minute, she thinks she sees some youth in him, some sign of his past.

It's not quite as satisfying as when Luke has faith or pride in her as it had been when Han did. The thought comes and goes from Rey's mind quickly, followed by the echoing memory of Kylo Ren's voice. 

_He would've disappointed you._

-


	5. Chapter 5

Poe spares a thought for Rey, whenever he has a free minute. What was keeping her? What has she found? 

For now, the First Order is on the run. Poe wants to think they can keep it that way, but there's no way to _know_ what they're up to. Poe can sense - not through any mysterious connection beyond intuition - that this was only a battle, not the war. 

If the First Order was being foxish now, it was a diversion. Poe's' heard too many stories of Empire to believe they've headed it off at the pass. It's an uncomfortable atmosphere to fly in, the thought that Starkiller Base was only the tip of some very large iceberg.

"We've got 'em on the run again, Black Leader," Snap Wexley's voice is loud and clear over the comm, sounding almost bored. "Do we follow, see if they lead us to anything interesting?"

Poe assesses. None of the X-wings are limping, but it's been a long flight. The First Order attack was more of a sting, an annoyance. It's a curious move - either teasing or accidental. He hates to do it, but Poe can't leave their freight ships unguarded. 

"Red Squad, follow those fighters," Poe says, tucking the nose of Black One down to swing around closer to the Resistance freight ships, scanning for any sign of damage or anything out of place. "If you get anything, good, but don't let them take you too far. Jess, Blue Squad, you're with me-"

"Babysitting _again_ ," Pava complains. 

"We're likely to be on a wild goose chase, Jess," Snap reassures her. "All these First Order jokers want to do is play around."

"You're gonna miss your opportunity," Poe warns.

"On it, Black Leader," Snap says. His fighter and the three others with red markings rush into hyperspace, streaking away on the same heading as the First Order runners. 

"Why do you always let Wexley have all the fun?" Pava asks. Poe understands her frustration.

"I'm here too, aren't I?" he reminds. "Snap knows when to take his info and run."

Silence answers Poe's true statement, and he reaches out to turn off the shields in favor of diverting power to long range sensors. His screen displays a quick scroll of information, reported from the supply freighters. Mostly concerned chatter about finding themselves the target of a First Order strike.

General Organa will have some tempers to sooth and fears to reassure when they get back to base. She'll do it. Poe doesn't know of a better diplomat. She hates almost every second of it.

Her job would be a lot easier with a Jedi at her side. It would give those wavering on the fence after the near destruction of the New Republic something to have faith in. A legend to rally behind when - well.

Poe's thoughts slide away - he's gone down that track too many times in his own mind. It's just that something keeps calling his thoughts back to Rey. Like the nagging sensation that you've forgotten something important back home. 

"BeeBee-Ate," he says, switching off communications between ships. The droid beeps acknowledgment. 

"I feel like I forgot something," Poe says. 

BB-8 beeps a short series of suggestions. Poe leaves one hand on the yoke and with the other, ticks each point off on the hard casing of his life support unit with a dull tap of his fingertip. Each point mentioned, he vividly recalls doing prior to takeoff. He has a ritual. So what was this unusual disquiet?

Maybe he'd just been flying too long. Even with the excitement of a First Order raid, they'd been on the route for hours now. He either would prefer more thrill or none at all. That little skirmish was just enough to get his blood going without being satisfying.

BB-8 makes one last suggestion that pulls Poe out of his thoughts again.

"No, I haven't done that," he admits.

Another inquisitive trill.

"No, I'm not sure the time is really right yet."

The next sound is scolding.

"Who said that?" Poe asks, deflecting. "Did I say that? It's just better if I let him get his feet under himself first, right?"

Skeptical silence.

"What do you want me to say, that I'll tell him the next time I see him?"

BB-8 beeps enthusiastically enough to suggest Poe has it on the first try.

Poe sighs. "Buddy, it's not that easy. What about Rey?"

The answer - suggestion, really - is just distracting enough for Poe to look away from his forward glass and toward the rear of the cockpit. BB-8's general direction, even if all Poe can see is the very top of the droid's white and orange dome. It's - _unconventional_ , but so is Poe, when it comes down to it. Enough to consider the option, anyway.

He's gathering a remark when BB-8 interrupts him with a shrill warning shriek - incoming enemy fighters dropping out of hyperspace right on top of them. BB-8 switches his com back on, letting Poe call orders to the remaining Blue squadron fighters. 

Worry wakes in the back of Poe's mind - _where is Wexley and Red Squad?_

Then there's no time to worry at all, just the hard-scrabble fight to survive against the returning First Order fighters - and they've brought friends.

-

Rey wakes from the strangest dream - one about piloting, but more vivid than her usual dreams. Usually, her dreams of flight are limited, small, like learning to fly on the flight sim program back home in her AT-AT shell on Jakku. She's never dreamed of being something else - some _one_ else. This time, she's sure it was Poe.

_Why_ would she dream she was someone she barely knows? To be sure, she'd liked him when she met him, sort of instinctively, but it hadn't been more than a passing acquaintance at Finn's bedside before they'd had to go separate ways.

Rey rubs her hands over her eyes and takes a deep breath of cool night air. If it was just a dream about flying, she almost might have been able to write it off, to just let it go even if it was a force-dream. A reaching into the mind that she'd been trying to reach in her waking hours. It almost makes sense. But it hadn't... at the end, she'd seen...

_Thought_ she'd seen- or dreamed -

Rey takes a deep breath, sitting up with her back straight and her balance centered like Luke taught her. She closes her eyes and reaches out into the universe, feeling for - _stretching_ for the threads that seem so often to elude her. This time, one seems to jump right into her grasp. There's no revelation, no clear idea of how she does it, and she's not sure she can replicate it later.

But, suddenly, her mouth is full of the dry taste of dust, her bones are full of an ache, a deep pain that feels like the aftermath of an earthquake. Her head aches and her left arm screams, and she's aware of a nagging sound; a rising string of beeping tones in Astromech Binary demanding an answer that she can't process yet.

Then the vision fades from her touch, pulling out of her grip faster the harder she tries to hold onto it. It wrests away from her with a dizzy, twisting sensation and leaves her gasping and awake on the stone bench she's seated on. She's certain, then. First, what she had seen was real, and Poe has crashed somewhere far off course; second he is still alive. 

She gets up, grabbing her robe. She needs R2-D2.

Rey finds the droid sitting patiently at Luke's side as he cooks breakfast. The smell - even though the fare is simple, it's real food and not polystarch or veg-meat - wakes up her hunger. Rey has never eaten so well as she has here. Her stomach growls, and she tries to focus.

"What's troubling you?" Luke says, looking up as she trots into the firelight. "Something's changed."

"I - _connected_ ," she says. Realizing the reality of it, she can't help but feel a little triumphant. "In my dreams I saw - but then it was real and I reached out to see..."

Rey sits down abruptly, reaching for the hot food. Suddenly, she's _ravenous_.

"I saw Poe Dameron crash," she says, getting her thoughts together as she juggles a hot, flat cake between her hands to cool. "Can Artoo communicate with the resistance base?"

Luke looks at her, measuring. He shakes his head. "Too far away. Our atmosphere is difficult to get a signal through."

A blessing, if you were hiding from the whole galaxy.

R2-D2 suggests, in binary, that BB-8 can be reached and Rey brightens. Despite the bad news that she can't alert the resistance to keep looking for Poe, she can reach _him_ to make sure he's alright. Faster and more reliably than if she tried to use the Force.

"You should focus on your training," Luke reminds. "What you see may not always come to pass, or may have gone so far before that you can't change it. Looking at the future is difficult and dangerous."

"How can it be dangerous to know what's coming?" she asks, mouth full of warm bread, eyes locked on the eggs sizzling in the pan. She swallows. "If you can anticipate things-"

"You try and change them," Luke says. "You can't always know the results. Sometimes, what you see happen isn't as bad as what you _make_ happen."

His words have the ring of experience. Rey wonders about that, about the absent way that he reaches out to run his artificial hand over R2-D2's domed top. The droid flashes a hesitant sort of light code with the indicators next to the visual receptor.

"I need to be able to _help_ ," Rey says. "Why am I learning all these things if I can't use them to help our friends?"

She is careful to include Luke, to remind him he's still connected to this. He doesn't miss it.

"I think right now he needs your help," Luke agrees. "But not necessarily the help of a Jedi."

_Is everything a riddle?_

"Artoo," Luke says. The droid acknowledges. "Can you reach the other droid now?"

R2-D2 answers negatively. 

" _Sandstorms_?" Rey asks, alarmed. R2-D2 affirms.

"Will you be so kind as to get Rey as soon as stable communication can be established?" Luke asks. The droid agrees.

"In the meantime," Luke continues. "I can think of a couple of exercises which would benefit from the added distraction."

-

Finn is sharing some of the intel he remembers from simulations training with General Leia - and feeling faintly guilty for it - when she gets the news.

Jessica Pava comes in straight from the mission in her flight uniform to make her report directly, and Finn knows enough about military affairs to know something's deeply wrong. _Poe_.

Pava only spares Finn a glance before starting her report; either not worried about privacy or feeling that Finn has a right to know. 

"General Organa, Commander Dameron is missing," she says, without any preamble, and looking somewhere fixed above Leia's head. She doesn't seem to like giving the news.

Finn is standing before he can stop himself, ready to go, ready to do whatever it takes to get his friend back. "Who took him? Was it the First Order?"

Jessica glances at him, clearly sympathetic, but returns her gaze pointedly to the General.

Embarrassment floods him, and Finn sits back down, feeling sheepish that he'd been so comfortable he'd forgotten Leia's rank.

She doesn't call him to task for it. 

"Answer the man," she says. "How does the Resistance _keep_ losing our best pilot?"

Jessica fidgets, and takes a deep breath. "The First Order staged two stings on our escort. The first one behaved strangely and Commander Dameron sent Snap - Captain Wexley, I mean - to investigate with Red Squad."

Finn listens carefully, anxious. Beside him, still seated, General Organa looks composed and in control, like a good leader. Finn envies her, as a dozen scenarios for the end of the story - Poe's X-Wing blown out of the sky, or captured by the First Order to be tortured again for the same sort of information Finn was handing out freely, or simply awaiting public execution in front of as many First Order troops as could be mustered.

After such a major loss as Starkiller Base, it would be held up as a return victory. Finn's anxiety increases.

"After that, the fighters returned with a second wave of First Order ships. Commander Dameron engaged and managed to lead them away while we escorted the supply freighters away to safety. We know he took a jump in hyperspace, and that Black One entered the atmosphere of a planet heavily damaged, but we lost communication and are unable to locate a signal from his tracking device."

"He crashed?" Finn asks.

Jessica glances at Leia for confirmation and receives an impatient wave of her hand.

"That's not confirmed, but I can't think of a reason why he'd go atmospheric and not come back into contact with us unless he put Black One down somewhere - crash or no crash," she says, looking at that spot over Leia's head again.

"What's being done to find him?" Leia asks.

"We've asked See-Threepio to try and locate BeeBee-Ate's signal, and we're trying, based on his last known co-ordinates and trajectory, to find any habitable worlds he might have been able to reach," Jessica reports. "But we only just landed back here."

She does look tired, just as worried as Finn feels, and yet has a sort of bright-eyed mania that suggests she'd jam her helmet back on and go right back out there if they found any sign of Poe.

"Thank you, Jessica," Leia asks. "Make your report to your interim XO, and I'll keep an eye on the situation."

Both hesitate, and then Leia adds; "if anyone could have landed safely in any possible circumstance, it's Poe Dameron. We won't give up until we find him."

What no one says - or dares to say - is that if they're not sure where to look, it could be a very long time before they see him again.

-


	6. Chapter 6

The landscape is not the most desolate Poe has ever seen, not the barren dunes that Jakku had presented, but still dry and desert. The ground he sits on, propped against the side of Black One beneath a sheltering S-Foil, is cracked and red. The whole world is colored gold and brown around him, covered in coarse, tall grass that presents as all sharp edges and hardscrabble twists of trees and bushes.

Poe has already learned that all of the plant life here is defensive - covered in thorns and spikes or irritating prickles. His good arm and ankles are covered in scratches from his earlier attempts to access his situation. The rip-stop material of his flight suit hadn't made any difference. And at the top of the rise he'd reached, his macrobinoculars hadn't revealed any signs of settlement. 

The atmosphere at least is breathable, or he wouldn't be worried about what to do now. Poe chews rations distractedly, the mealy-bland taste of protein substitute coating his tongue. He's tired, his left arm hurts now with a dull throb instead of the bright agony before he'd bound it up between two splints - _splints!_ \- from the first aid kit crammed under the pilot-ejector seat of Black One. He feels sluggish and thirsty.

What he wouldn't give for a hot cup of caf to clear his thoughts.

"BeeBee-Ate," he calls up to the droid - the T-70's engine was badly damaged and the electrical systems seemed almost hopelessly surged. It meant BB-8 was stuck in the astromech socket until Poe could muster up the strength to pull the two-handed manual release switch with one hand.

BB-8 replies shortly. If Poe didn't know any better, he'd say the droid was grouchy. _That makes two of us, buddy._

"When we get off this rock, remind me to alter the contents of the emergency rations kits in anything I fly," he says, feeling his dry lips starting to crack. The air here is so dry it feels like its desiccating him even in the shade. 

BB-8 queries.

"Remind me to add instant caf crystals," he says. "A lot of them."

The answer is short - and technically true. He barely has enough water for water, let alone caf. Poe had consumed almost half of his supply after waking, parched and pain-blind, sure that someone would quickly come after him. Or that there'd be civilization here. An outpost. _Something._

Who ever heard of a planet with breathable atmosphere that no one lived on?

"Well, I know that it wouldn't do much good _now_ ," Poe laments, wishing BB-8 were a little less logical when he was trying to fantasize about a real breakfast.

BB-8 hushes him, urgently.

"A message?"

Affirmative.

"From who?"

BB-8 tells him.

"Rey?" Well don't just tell me, buddy," Poe says, scrambling out from under the wing and up the side of the X-Wing one-handed. The black painted metal scalds his hands where he touches it, and he realizes heat's rising off the surface like a mirage. Shimmering. _Hot!_

"Poe?" she asks, and Poe can see the holo-projection hovering over Black One's aft behind the astromech socket. 

"I'm coming!" he calls, yanking his flight gauntlets out from under his belt and pulling one on with his teeth. He hauls himself up onto the precarious space on the fuselage between the S-foils, careful not to touch the hull with his bare skin.

"Boy am I glad to see you," Poe says, meaning it. He's glad to see _any_ face, especially a familiar one.

"Are you alright?" Rey asks, likely taking in his splinted arm and disheveled appearance. 

"Well, I'm alive," Poe says. "Listen, I crash landed on this desert planet out on the Rim. Can you get word back to the resistance that I'm-"

She's shaking her head. _Why is she shaking her head already?_ Poe's hopes sink. 

"Artoo is trying to find a secure chain of communication, but we're pretty remote. _You_ are, too, for your information," Rey tells him.

"Yeah," Poe says, resigned. Of course it can't be that easy. "I was trying to lead a couple of First Order fighters away from our supply convoy."

He'd made a couple of rash decisions. Enough that he'd be sure the mission was a success. Anyone else would have pulverized themselves trying to switch hyperspace lanes on the fly. In fact, Poe had counted on it - the pursuing First Order vessels had collided violently with a normal mass shadow. 

By contrast, Poe is lucky. He's alive.

"Will you be alright until help can get there?" Rey asks.

"Well, I can breathe," Poe says. "Got two more days of rations. Low on water, though."

"BeeBee-Ate," Rey asks. "Can you transmit data on the atmospheric conditions? I know there are storms-"

"There are storms?" Poe asks, thinking _water_.

"Sandstorms, yes. That's why I can't call you too often."

" _Sand_ storms?" Poe repeats, his thirst increasing.

"Yes," Rey says, sounding deeply serious. "Do you have shelter? How much water do you have?"

"I can get back in the cockpit," Poe says, looking at the small, cramped space. It never seems bad when it's to fly, but he's not sure how much he likes the ide of being trapped in there in a storm. 

"And you need to cover your head when you're outside," Rey tells him, sounding stern.

"I thought that would keep too much heat in," Poe says.

"It keeps moisture in, too. And sunburn at bay."

Poe doesn't often burn in the sun. The last time, he'd been a kid. He hadn't even thought of it. "Alright, I'll put my helmet back on."

"And your water?"

"I have the moisture collector up, but it's slow going," Poe admits. "Not a lot left in the rations kit. A liter, maybe."

"You'll have to build a second solar still," Rey tells him. "And extract water from plants." 

"I'm not sure even the plants have that much water," Poe says. "They seem to have fewer leaves than thorns."

"A little means a lot, when you don't have any," she says. "And more to reclaim later."

Poe doesn't like the sound of that. "Reclaim?"

"Just listen to me," Rey says. "I only have a few more minutes."

The process of water reclamation is exactly what Poe fears.

-

Leia thinks she knows the look she sees on Finn's face whenever she sees him in the days after Lieutenant Pava's report. She recognizes the first wakening of deep, helpless concern - the same she had felt when someone she cared deeply about was in danger, but she had to wait to act.

Maybe she's over-sympathizing. Her own loss is recent enough, the fresh agony still trying to wait for her whenever she slows down.

Leia's solution is not to slow down. There's an abundance of work tod o; two orders on the verge of collapse. Or she can at least hope that the destruction of Starkiller Base has caused as much squabbling and infighting as the loss of the seat - and the majority of the members - of the new Republic Council. 

What Leia wouldn't' give to have her old friend Mon Mothma to turn to now. Then again, she'd dedicated her life to re-establishing the republic senate. No-one should have to see their life's work undone. But, busy as she is, she never forgets that not every part of existence thrives on the Galactic level. Some things that are far smaller can make all the difference.

She's missing a pilot. The resistance is missing its inspiration to be wholly, recklessly alive. Finn, though he works as hard as any of his comrades, is missing his friend. Something blossoms out of that bleak landscape under Leia's gaze. Real, good potential.

Leia summons C-3PO from his duties.

"Where is BeeBee-Ate," she asks, sternly.

"I'm terribly sorry," C-3PO stammers, flustered by something. "We haven't been able to obtain a stable signal." 

"What? BeeBee-Ate's an alliance droid. Haven't you fitted and activated a tracking device?"

C-3PO's distress seems to increase exponentially. Leia _knows_ that getting angry won't help, but her frustration sparks up brighter even before C-3PO can explain himself.

"After what happened on the mission to Jakku, I made sure to check and activate BeeBee-Ate's tracking device myself, C-3PO practically wails. "Only - oh! I'm such a fool. I should have _tested_ it."

"Slow down," Leia says. "You said you can't get a _stable_ signal. What _can_ we get?"

"A few minutes at a time. Oh, it must be a faulty unit. I should have known that something would go wrong!"

Leia lets him berate himself, used to his outbursts. There's still good information in the otherwise useless panic. There's a signal, which means that BB-8 is still functional. That means there's a chance for Commander Dameron, too.

"Threepio," Leia interrupts his worried nattering, driving to the heart of the matter. "When was the most recent contact?"

"Just a few hours ago," C-3PO says. "But nothing came of it. The contact was much too short to trace back to the source."

"But you got a signal. How many times has this happened?"

"Five, but each is much too short for progress-"

"Is there a pattern?" Leia cuts him off, before he starts berating himself for the same imagined failings. 

"I-" C-3PO starts, taken aback. "Well, I hadn't thought to check. Five is not a very large sample pool, and it's not as if it's been at the same time every-"

"Figure out if it is," Leia orders, cutting through his excuses. "Then figure out how to track it, based on that."

"Oh!" C-3PO snaps to his stiff sort of attention, shuffling anxiously toward the exit.

"And get Finn up here. I need some competent leadership on this," Leia orders.

C-3PO shuffles away at a snail's pace to obey her command, and Leia thinks that he's only the most efficient spy-master because he's so _inefficient_ at everything else.

-

Finn looks at the information again. He's been looking at it for hours. Long enough that all of his survival training keeps kicking in at the back of his thoughts, a ticking-clock warning of how long a person could survive in different sorts of danger or deprivation. 

It's not useful. He knows it isn't, but Finn has never been able to turn off that little risk analysis segment in the back of his mind, telling him now a person can survive only three days without water; three hours in the cold...

The last time he'd tried to stop considering such aspects, F.N. - 2003 had made his last, recklessly bad decision.

"Alright," he says. "The signal comes at least twice within a standard cycle."

"We know," Pava tells him.

"I'm repeating aloud," Finn says. "Talking myself through it."

She looks at him for a long moment as if she's guessing how sincere he is. Finn's learned a lot about the pilots in the last few days, having earned his way into their guarded friendship when he'd gone to them first after being assigned to locate Poe by General Leia. 

Well, after he'd picked his jaw up off the floor.

"Okay," she says, deciding that he's not messing with her. "Aside from that, it doesn't seem to come at any specific time, and never seems to last long enough to get any more information out of it. They may not even be aware that we're able to receive anything."

"But, based on his last known heading, reported damage to Black One on the inside limit and remaining fuel on the outside..." Finn leans over the table and taps two buttons. "As well as the rough direction we can get from the intermittent contact, narrows our search to..."

A read outline overlays the galactic map, a 3-D representation of the known universe. It begins as a circle, then unfolds into a sphere, encompassing what's still a pretty daunting area of territory.

"That's not very narrow," Captain Wexley - nicknamed 'Snap' in a tradition that Finn understands - observes.

"It's narrower than the whole universe," Nien Nunb says, struggling with the Common. He trains one large, dark eye on the highlighted area appraisingly. As a veteran of the universe, the Sullustan's experienced opinion is one Finn is interested in hearing.

"It won't be populated," Nien says. "Unless it's by First Order outpost."

"What do you mean?" Jess asks.

"If there was anyone friendly - or even indifferent - that Poe could get to, he'd have found a way to get in touch with us," Finn realizes. Nien nods.

Finn taps a sequence of keys.

"We don't even know if he's _with_ BeeBee-Ate," Snap says.

"If he has a choice, he'll be with his droid and Black One," Jess snaps, giving her superior a dark look.

"If he doesn't have a choice, BeeBee-Ate's still our best lead," Finn agrees.

Finn taps a few controls on the holodisplay, changing parameters. The list of possibilities shrinks, becoming separate spheres within the original boundaries. 

Five. Widely spaced within the search area. Small worlds with no settlements, but capable of sustaining human life. Barely, in some cases.

"Are those the options?" Jess asks, leaning over the table to look closer and interrupting part of the hologram.

"The ones with the best possible outcome," Finn says. "Which is where we should try first, don't you think?"

He looks up to see their expressions, to hear their opinions, once again finding the clear open expressions they wear to be a strange sort of boon. As a Stormtrooper, all of his fellows were usually hidden in their helmets, features invisible. 

"You're the one in charge, kid," Nien reminds him, with the Sullustan version of a grin - mostly in the eyes. "If Leia thinks you can do it, I believe her."

It's a big compliment coming from someone he knew by reputation, even in the First Order educational systems. It's a strange sensation. _How do they trust me so much?_

"We have a list and a week if we're lucky," Finn says. "Let's start crossing names off of it."

-

Rey sits quietly , trying not to let her thoughts stray to the sandstorm she knows is raging on the planet Poe's trapped on. She can almost feel it crawling under her own skin, the abrasive sand scraping beneath her clothes. She knows firsthand how dangerous such storms can be. 

Instead, she tries to channel her mind like she channels the Force; now floating several small stones that she can feel the weight and heft of. Cradled by the connection to all things around them, as if in the palm of her hand.

It is, perhaps, the same feeling of concern she has about Poe. He was injured, alone, not a very good survivor when it came down to him against the landscape. Rey holds the stones aloft and wishes she could hold him safe that way. She hopes the storm goes easy on her friend - she truly thinks of him that way, now. 

Something about his vulnerable eyes the last time they had spoken - isolation was clearly taking its toll, along with hunger and injury. 

On Jakku, she would have thought nothing of leaving him to his fate. The weak were claimed by the desert. The strong survived. 

But here, on this green and gentle planet, she's learned that there are many types of strength. Poe had a kind that she liked - she knows now that he too had endured Kylo Ren's questioning. Another kind of strength, one she's always had difficulty with, is patience.

The hardest one.

"Focus," Luke reminds her, motionless at her side.

It would be _easier_ if she wasn't so acutely aware of his presence. As her connection to the force becomes stronger, she becomes more attuned to how many ripples he causes. Small, like a stick-legged insect skimming over the surface of a lake. Tiny ripples, but innumerable. H e is hiding a wave by dispersing it in centimeters. A tsunami, perhaps. It's hard to tell, but Rey can feel it now, constantly.

So there's the pressing awareness of the raging sandstorm facing Poe on one side, and on the other, Luke Skywalker.

"I don't see why we can't just go help him," she says, when the thought refuses to be contained any longer. The rocks she holds suspended crash to the ground. Nearby, R2-D2 drops from a height of several centimeters on the grassy turf with a hollow and final bang.

She'd forgotten she was holding R2-D2 up. The droid unleashes an angry tirade that would peel the paint off a freighter.

Luke lets out a deep sigh as Rey struggles to apologize to the droid, casting his eyes upward as if in need of some guidance himself.

"There is still much you must learn to face, before you are ready to leave here," Luke says. His eyes look very tired when he turns them to meet her gaze. "Once you leave this place, danger will come from all sides. But you're as ready to begin to face these things as I was."

He gets up, and begins to lead her down a path they have never taken before.

-


	7. Chapter 7

"So what was it like growing up on Jakku?" Poe asks, leaning under the closed S-foils of Black One in his little make-shift shelter. At Rey's instruction, he has sacrificed most of the contents of the survival pack to create a small, enclosed and shaded place beneath the solid roof of the wings. He'd also, finally, managed to open the manual release on the astromech socket. BB-8 has hardly left his side since.

"Well," she says, projected into the small dark cave built of blankets and laboriously gathered brush. "You're almost living it."

Poe supposes he is. "But you were less isolated at least."

She laughs. "Not that I much liked company. Sure, I could take my salvage and go into town and trade for a few bites to eat, but I didn't really _like_ anybody."

If it wasn't for the way her image is smiling at him, open and honest through even the unknown space between them, Poe would find that incredibly sad.

"Before I ask, I want you to know how grateful I am for your company," Poe says, trying to remain charming when he knows he's getting dirtier and more disheveled by the second. "But what changed your mind?"

"Well," she says. "I met some different people!"

"Like Finn?" Poe says. He knows he's fishing. Meddling. There's hardly anything else to do. Her transmissions get through at the apex of the day, when it's too hot to do anything but stay in the shade and try to conserve water. Without them, Poe's pretty sure he'd be a lot worse off. Even with her regular contact, he's sharply aware that he's the only person on the planet.

The quiet at night gets to him.

"Well," she says. "Yes, like Finn. And BeeBee-Ate," she adds.

The droid whirs a low, pleased sound, returning the compliment. Rey smiles at that, her own rare version of happiness. Poe's smile answers instinctively. She has one of those infectious grins, the kind that only appears when she means it, and Poe finds it both charming and beautiful.

"Growing up on Jakku was long and slow and tedious," she says. "You couldn't trust anyone."

"I'm glad you changed your mind," Poe says.

"I'm not sure I've _completely_ changed my mind," she corrects him, looking a little pensive. "I don't know how you trust anyone as easily as you do."

"Well, I met the right people," Poe confesses, and he enjoys the smile that earns.

Rey's gaze is piercing, even through the holo-message. She looks straight at him as she feeds back his own question acutely. "Like Finn?"

Poe laughs; she's got him. "Like Finn."

It's somehow easy to tell her, it seems like she already knows.

"Are you going to tell him?" she asks.

"Wait a minute," Poe says. "I don't want to get in the way of anything. Are _you_ going to tell him?"

It feels juvenile, something that should get put aside for a better time. Like passing notes in class - an act Poe had done his fair share of up to and even through his military training with the New Republic. Poe has to admit - it's been long enough that it may not matter. For now, he's scraping by, but no one has come to his rescue yet.

He is aware, no matter how hard he tries to put it out of his mind, of how precarious his situation is. One major event could negate all of his small efforts at survival. One unexpected change might be all that it took to tip the delicate balance out of his favor.

Rey sits back a little, her expression serious as if she's reading his thoughts. Then, she smiles daringly at him. "I was going to wait until he told me."

"He hasn't yet?" Poe asks - just like that, the potential for tension is broken, left behind them.

She shakes her head, still smiling.

"Maybe I still have a chance, then," he teases.

"To tell Finn?"

"To tell _you_ ," Poe answers, thinking he has to make the first gesture sometime. She can do as she likes with it. "You're pretty cute, you know."

She wrinkles up her nose and blushes - just a little. "Thanks, Poe."

"I mean, I know I hardly look like the sort of person you want a compliment from," he remembers, belatedly. He is an unshaven and unwashed strandee, and she has only seen him at his best once. She takes it with grace.

"I'll make you a deal," Poe continues, pushing onward. "If I get out of here before the next century, we can both tell him together."

She laughs. "That might overwhelm him."

"Finn's pretty tough," Poe assures her. "He's pretty good at rolling with the punches."

She looks at him, eyes squinting. "Good. That'll make three of us."

Poe knows a challenge when he sees one. He takes that to mean she's accepted his tentative solution. It ignites a low flame in him, somewhere between anxiety and excitement; that razor's edge that he loves every second of. But - they aren't there yet.

"How's training?" he asks. "How's Luke?"

"The answer to both is; 'a little strange'," Rey admits, accepting the change of subject. BB-8 beeps a time warning and Poe hears R2-D2 echo it on the other side of the connection.

"I better get inside," Poe says, remembering Rey's earlier warning - before his desperation for company had lured her into a longer conversation.

Rey nods. This promised to be the biggest sandstorm he'd faced yet, and if there was one thing this planet has an abundance of, it was those. At the very least, they come often enough that the sand never seems to accumulate in any one place. Deposits made by one storm are lifted away by the next.

"Be careful out there," Poe tells her. "I'm counting on you."

"You too, Poe," she says, just as the makeshift walls of his shelter begin to rattle. "Don't forget your promise."

-

The _Mellcrawler II_ is not a luxury ship by any stretch of the imagination. A smaller freighter than even the _Millennium Falcon_ , it almost makes up for it in speed. Finn wonders exactly what kind of legal freight it's meant to haul in so small a space, and with such haste. He has the good sense not to ask Nien Nunb any such question.

First off, it doesn't seem polite, and secondly, Finn is already getting wise to the fact that the Sullustan's Common seems to suddenly deteriorate when it comes to questions he doesn't want to answer.

At least the crew quarters aren't any smaller than some of the bunks Finn has occupied the past, and he's not expected to share on rotation. His only other company aboard the ship is the sensor equipment borrowed from the survey corps and packed into every millimeter of the ship. Its intent is to turn the search of a planet from an endeavor that could take months - if not years - to a matter of hours.

It also means that the rest of the ship is stripped to practical necessity, leaving room to recover Poe and the Black One if that's eventually possible. Finn has no recourse from his anxious thoughts and the passage of time. Nien is a competent pilot, but the trip to the Rim cannot go any faster than hyperspace.

Finn sits exhausted in his bunk for nearly sixteen hours, thinking over his approach to the mission with harsh self-criticism. If he was wrong - if some other scenario played out, Finn will have w wasted everyone's time at best. At the worst - and here is where he's kicking himself - he could be leading resistance members, including several of their few remaining X-Wing pilots - into a First Order trap. 

It occurs to Finn only in the second hour of his travel with Nien - not soon enough to do anything effective about it. So late, in fact, that Finn worries about saying anything even to Nien for fear of appearing guilty - of plotting to withhold information.

It seems too subtle for the First Order. Surely, if they had Poe, they'd just advertise it. No need to try and lure more of the resistance out by subterfuge. They would have attempted a rescue anyway. 

Could the First Order comprehend this? Or was it an attempt to maximize the number that fell into their net? Finn doesn't like either thought. He can't know for sure until they get there. 

More worrying still, they have only received a signal from BB-8 once since beginning the journey - now more than fourteen hours past. Finn is aware that without a recurrence of the signal, they'll have to rely on the readings from the equipment. 

Every second with no signal burns its way into Finn's awareness. What if they hadn't gotten here fast enough? What if something irrevocable has happened?

Finn shakes himself. It doesn't matter. He's going to keep up hope until he knows for sure. He'd given up on Poe once and been wrong. 

_I'm going to get him back,_ Finn thinks, _One way or... well. One way. None the worse for the wear._

He does his best to cement the last thought in his mind so it will stick. Besides, the others would hardly give up just because of a couple of obstacles or a little uncertainty. It's part of the Resistance that Finn really likes. It's not about the odds of success or the risk involved versus some overarching idea of the greater good. 

The greater good, under the eye of the First Order, never felt very good. Not matter how uncertain the outcome out here, this feels like the right decision. 

The sixteenth hour slides past under Finn's worry. he emerges, unrested, to find Nien reclined in the pilot's chair, just as nonchalantly bored as Finn is wired.

"Any signal?" Finn asks, putting aside his concern that Nien seems to be steering the _Mellcrawler II_ with his knees, in Hyperspace. 

Nien shakes his head, slow, blinking his big eyes as if shaking off sleep. He sits up at last and puts his hands on the controls.

"Nope," he says. "Have to do it the hard way."

He guides the ship out of hyperspace in a smooth motion, actions confident while he mutters quietly to himself in Sullustan.

"What?" Finn asks, slipping into the co-pilot's seat to peer anxiously out the window for any sign of a Star Destroyer. The last thing he wants to see is the _Finalizer_ out there. "Something bad?"

Nien looks at him, squinting, a serious look on his jowly face.

"No," he says, indicating the vast stretch of open space interrupted only by the planet they're going to investigate. "Don't they teach stormtroopers anything but Galactic Common?"

Finn shakes his head, apologetically. He'd never known he was missing anything until he'd been floundering alone in the world. Rey could navigate through any situation with complete ease, while Finn felt alone and exposed without his unit. Probably, that isolation and lack of empathy via communication are by design. 

Nien takes pity on him. "I said, I hope we find the Commander."

The words are difficult, but Finn understands them well enough. He echoes the sentiment as Nien flicks several switches on the console, re-routing the _Mellcrawler II's_ power supplies to the sensor equipment.

"He owes me a drink."

-

Rey tries not to think about her last - she corrects herself; her _most recent_ conversation - with Poe. She's sure Luke knows anyway. He's had her going nonstop - running and swimming until she's exhausted her own reserves and pulled the rest from the world where she can. It feels imperfect - every request takes an investment of her own. A small one, to be sure, but each time she knows it's a greater fraction of what she has left.

Now, what she's pulled from the world around her feels like a wall at her back, pressing her against the wall that limits her body. 

Rey knows better than to ask Luke if she can stop. She can still think, despite all of her self berating not to. It's not time to stop yet.

"Finn," she murmurs to herself. "Sorry I wasn't there when you woke up."

She misses him. Misses his smile and steady - but not boring - presence. Rey trusts Luke instinctively, but doesn't know him. Maybe no one in the universe does anymore.

"I guess," she grunts, swinging her hand up for another handhold, pulling on it. "You're more likely to come to me than I am to get back to you. I don't know if I'm not ready..."

Her words are a steady cadence to herself, now, almost mindless. Having started talking, it's like someone has pulled the plug on a wash basin. It drains out of her thoughts effortlessly now that she's speaking the items out loud.

"Or if _Luke's_ not ready," she continues, peering up the cliff face. Luke is waiting at the top, watching. "But a lot of times, it feels like I'm still waiting on Jakku. Waiting while my family faces the unknown. Waiting to grow old, while I miss people."

She finds a foothold. Pushes herself up on screaming muscles to the next outcropping.

"I don't think patience and waiting are the same things anymore," she admits. Her body aches and Rey reaches out for the Force again, opening the gate into herself.

This time, she knows it's not enough. For a moment, Rey exists as nothing more than the function of muscles for upward drive. If she falls, the Force won't save her from the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.

She has known - has the benefit of the universe learning before her time - that Jedi are just as mortal.

Luke's hand comes down to pull her up. She hadn't realized how close to the top she was. Rey surmounts the cliff feeling as hollow and scooped out as the caves below. As shaky as a foal.

She lays on the cold stone and breathes and _feels_. Rey has never felt anything so beautiful and pure as the cold air moving in and out of her lungs. She even welcomes the incessantly cold breeze coming in off the sea, cooling her heated muscles beneath the slick layer of sweat.

Pawing the canteen off her belt, Rey upends it more or less into her mouth. A portion splashes onto her neck, wasted, but bringing relief.

"I think you're ready," Luke says.

Rey rolls her eyes toward him in disbelief. "If you mean ready to get off the ground, you're mistaken."

He gives her one of his small smiles. Rey takes it to mean that she's going to do whatever it is that Luke is about to ask. She's never climbed this cliff before. The ledge she and Luke occupy is deep, stable. There is a ladder up behind Luke - and a cave. A black, open maw.

Rey's blood goes cold looking at it. She rolls slowly to her feet. "What's in there?"

"Only what you bring with you," Luke says. "A test."

"A test?" she echoes, bracing her hands on her knees. Her hand trails to the lightsaber at her side. Vader's saber. The one that Kylo Ren had wanted so badly.

"Fear and anger are the tools of the dark side, weapons to which you must develop a resistance," Luke tells her. "Your defeat of Ben Solo will have strengthened his reserves of these."

Rey nods, still panting. "Are they stronger? The things the dark side uses?"

Luke puts his hands into the opposite sleeves of his robe, considering his answer. She gets the feeling that he does this when deviating from what answers he feels obligated to give versus the truth. 

"It will seem that way," Luke says. He gestures toward the cave. "You must decide for yourself if that strength is an illusion or reality."

Rey gathers herself. She is tired to trembling, her sweat gone cold on her back and arms. Every instinct that has kept her alive screams for her to stay away from the cave. Within, she thinks she sees something moving, slow and low in the dark. Slithering. 

Only what she brings with her. Rey stops. She un-clips the lightsaber from her belt and hands it to Luke, then breaks off a sturdy and relatively straight root from the sickly ones hanging exposed around the mouth of the cave. She steps between the others into the blackness.

-


	8. Chapter 8

Rey grips the impromptu staff tightly. The air inside the cave is stale, musty tasting. Unmoving. It's like breathing through a sweaty rag, she thinks. _No, worse._ There is a foul smell that reeks like rot or wrongness. _It's like breathing through one of Unkar Plutt's_ socks.

When nothing happens to her as her eyes adjust aside from the bad smell, Rey relaxes some. The space is cramped with more roots and some mossy tendrils that find enough light and air to survive somehow. Everything is quiet but the distant pounding of the waves in the hollows of the rock below, the ocean shaping the stone relentlessly.

The tide rolls in and out like a long, slow, rasping and rattling breath. It grows louder the further she goes, seeming to crawl up her spine and into her exhausted thoughts, growing.

Soon, the sound dwells there, buzzing at the forefront of her mind. It leaves her anxious, unable to stop the illogical fear that she has stepped into the breathing maw of some massive creature while it only pretends to be asleep.

She can hardly see anything, the light is a long way behind her, but Rey can feel her way, relying instinctively on the Force when her eyes fail her. The unseen objects around her feel unclean, and she doesn't want to touch any of it. It is not a natural decay, but the rot of sickness, the taint of early death. Rey weaves around what she can. The rest touches her skin with patches of ice cold that refuse to warm again, leaving her shivering.

Ahead, she can see a dim red light and hope opens up in her chest. Is this the worst the cave has to offer? Is she almost clear of it?

With the certainty of fools who have passed at test she forges on quickly. What she comes upon is not an exit. Shoving aside a last tangle of greasy, sickly roots, Rey steps into the dim light.

It is emitting from all the warning indicators in the cockpit of a ruined X-Wing. She knows, fully , that it's impossible for this distinctive orange and black shape to be here. Knows that Poe has crashed on a desert planet outside this system.

Or - was _that_ the dream, and _this_ the reality?

There seems to be no persuading her eyes that they see anything but the crumpled and badly damaged fuselage of Black One.

The cockpit lights are all indicating catastrophic failure. Is this a vision of the future? Has it already happened, and the rest outside the cave is only a comforting mirage? Not wanting to look, Rey moves forward anyway, compelled. The pilot seat is empty but soaked in red-black blood. Rey can smell it now, a powerful half-turned aroma that overcomes the moldering rot of the cave.

The blood leaves a darker streak down the side of the X-Wing, as if the originator has crawled free. Rey turns to follow it over the ground and her foot crunches down on something hard that collapses under her weight.

Looking down, she can't quite make sense of what she's seeing at first. It is a piece of shrapnel in Poe's familiar favorite color of orange, but it isn't from the X-Wing. Without thinking, with the ceaseless thundering breath of the surf in her ears, she picks it up. 

The part she has crushed underfoot is an antenna, attached to a larger piece. She holds aloft before her agonized gaze a ragged chunk of BB-8's destroyed dome, and comes to comprehend what that means. BB-8 is gone and the trail of blood only leads deeper into the cave.

Something else is in here with her.

_Rey!_

It's Finn's voice at the edge of her awareness, panicked and desperate. Like when the Rathtar had ripped him away from her in the maze of Han's secondary freighter. Afraid.

She drops the broken piece of droid and holds her makeshift staff a little tighter, wishing she hadn't been so overconfident as to leave her lightsaber. The sound of Finn's voice comes from the darkness further in the cave, beyond what the lights from the cockpit reach. Rey follows it, pulling the Force close to her tired body like a mantle of armor.

Beyond the light, a point of shocking cold touches her cheek. She reaches up to brush it away, finding it to be wet. Cold. A single drop of - _snow_ , she realizes, when the next flake falls. The frigid bite of it fills the air around her impossibly, drifting down from the unseen heights of the ceiling. She knows what's coming now.

The hum of the red lightsaber activating proceeds the illumination that opens the cave around them, a grey and somehow vast space. Snow drifts soundlessly between them.

There's an accumulation of snow on the cave floor. A body is crumpled in it, stretched and wounded at Kylo Ren's feet. Finn, spread helpless again. Kylo Ren steps back, lifting his blade to better light the slashed and unconscious figure.

Anger reawakens at Rey's core. Indignity. With ferocity, Rey raises her staff - she _should_ have killed Kylo Ren on Starkiller Base. She'd had a chance; a clear moment that she remembers in her dreams. Instead, she left an injured enemy to haunt her. A threat - to her and her friends, waiting for revenge. It is an endless cycle now that the first strike has been issued and answered, There is only one finality that will end it so that this shattered future does not come to pass.

She bares her teeth and raises her staff, stepping over Finn's sprawled form defensively. Putting herself between Finn and the enemy. Kylo Ren does not advance - just peers at her, hooded mask expressionless. There is not even the shine of alert intelligence from the void-eyes of the mask, the red light traces against the chrome patters over the mask's blunt muzzle but no deeper. No expression. Unmoving.

Rey realizes he's waiting for _her_ to take the first strike. She tightens her grip on the knurled wooden root - it's not a good match, a lightsaber against a stick. _What's his game?_ Is he waiting to cut the staff apart in her hands? What is wrong with this picture?

Rey takes a deep breath and reaches for her strength. Presses past the fear like she had the last time she'd faced Kylo Ren. Her confidence returns. _A test._ What has she learned?

"The force is stronger when used for wisdom and defense," she tells the specter, drawing herself straighter and resting the bottom of the staff on the cave floor. She will hold her ground. Kylo Ren will not touch her friends again.

"You're wrong," the deep, sad voice of Kylo Ren tells her. "You can't see the power of the dark side. Optimism and lies have blinded you."

His hand is shaking, disguised partly by the sickly tremble of the blade. When she sees this, she understands. 

She has strength, but he doesn't. Kylo Ren stands on the lie that one side of the Force is stronger than the other, an edifice that Snoke has constructed beneath him, now rapidly crumbling from under his feet. It's Ben Solo who isn't strong, and the strength of the Force is what the user has brought with them.

He suspects it - so she had seen when he had reached into her mind - that he does not have the strength to harness the wild and deep anger of the dark side, or to hold himself solid in the brilliant flow of the light.

She understands.

Rey lowers her staff and welcomes in the ferocious calm of the ocean, the patience of it pounding away at the rock below, standing tall. Instead of her opposition, she offers her hand, palm-up.  
-

Finn watches the endless string of readouts scrolling over the screens and holo-displays filling the cabin. It's slow going - the long range scanners foiled by the planet's ferocious weather. Massive sandstorms seemed to continually roll over much of the planet's surface. 

It plays havoc with Finn's patience as he tries to juggle the sensors back and forth over the clear areas of the planet, all the while worried that there's still been no communications from BB-8.

Jess and her team have checked in once already - she'd had the least hostile planet to check and had completed her scans to her satisfaction. Finn won't let himself feel anxious about that - they want to find Poe just as badly as he does, and he can't expect to do everything himself and find Poe before it won't matter anymore.

His comm lights up and Finn briefly indulges in the surge of foolish hope that it will be BB-8. It isn't - the signal is from Captain Wexley. Has it been that long?

"What'd you find?" Finn asks optimistically, turning on the viewer.

Wexley's serious, helmeted face fills the screen, looking somewhat worse for the wear. By Finn's best calculation he's been in the cockpit of his X-Wing for nearly three days.

"Lots of dirt," the captain reports, with a sigh. "There's lots of vegetation, but nothing more advanced than bacteria."

Finn's hopes sink again. He doesn't ask if Wexley is sure - the man looks miserably positive.

"Sorry to hear that," Finn says. "Thanks for looking."

"Have you gotten any more signals from BeeBee-Ate?" Wexley asks, penetrating to the heart of Finn's worries. 

Well, if Finn is worried by it, it makes sense that Poe's other friends would be too. He shakes his head.

Wexley shakes his head back. "I guess you haven't found anything either, or you wouldn't have asked me if I had."

There's a pause, and Wexley stretches himself out, waiting. Finn's not sure if he's supposed to answer or how he will. He's covered almost eighty percent of the planet's surface and come up with nothing more advanced than grazing ungulates. There didn't even seem to be any large predators - an evolutionary chain where the focus on finding and obtaining water and plant sustainence either hasn't yet resulted in many meat eaters or never will. A wise person might cut their losses now, but Finn has a feeling...

"You know," Wexley says, pulling Finn's attention back - why was his mind wandering so much? "Before this expedition, I didn't really trust you."

"Well," Finn says - it stings a little, but doesn't hurt. "If it makes you feel any better, I never really had any friends that trusted me at all, before Poe."

This doesn't surprise Wexley. He just nods once, solemn. "When I was a kid, I knew a guy who had deserted the Empire for a while. It was just like that. Nobody trusted each other."

He smiles, and it's not really a pleasant expression, but genuine. "That's how I know we'll win this time, too. Discipline and distrust may seem like strong glue but it isn't. Love is. Loyalty is. Sometimes even crazy reckless bravery will do in a pinch."

Finn doesn't try to argue that the First Order teaches a _version_ of all of these things. Probably because they also instill a certain amount of tact. 

"Anyway," Wexley says. "I'm glad this wasn't a trap."

"Me too," Finn admits.

"Commander Dameron likes you," Wexley continues. "I can see these things. I'd hate for him to feel betrayed by someone he trusted."

There's a story here, Finn things, the sort of individual tale that every member of the resistance seems to have rather than the First Order's attempts to manufacture unity out of homogeneity. 

"Me too," Finn admits. "But I'd rather we found him than worry what it looks like I might be doing."

"Alright," Wexley agrees. "I can take a hint. Headed for my next assignment. I'll report back when I know something."

"Thanks, Captain Wexley," Finn says, meaning 'for everything'. 

"I got a good feeling about this next planet," Wexley tells him, before terminating the comm.

Finn turns back to the readouts - another 5% complete and no luck. Nothing but the one massive storm still grinding away over the main continent. They're more than half done now, Finn realizes, with two planets completely scanned and one nearly finished. No sign of Poe, BB-8 or Black One. No sign, either, of the pursuit that had been after him when he disappeared. Doubt assails Finn. What if Poe had turned around, started to come back before crashing or running out of fuel?

 _No._ If this plan doesn't work, they'll go back and formulate another one. Or Finn will find Rey again and they can use the Force if that's what it takes. Finn's not giving up on Poe this time without solid evidence that he should. No matter what that entails. He wouldn't give up on Rey, either, in the same situation. _I guess that means keep going until I find a body. Breathing or otherwise._

Nien Nunb's soft, liquid version of throat clearing interrupts Finn's determined thoughts.

"I have a call in the cockpit I think you should be a part of," he says, in hesitant Common.

"A call?" Finn's nerve surge up. Was it General Organa calling them back? Has something happened? Finn nods and puts all of his feelings carefully aside for a moment as he follows the Sullustan into the cockpit, with one last nervous glance at the scanning equipment. He hates to miss any sign the instant it happens, but only the most important message would pull him away. 

What could it be?

-

The cockpit of the X-Wing may never feel comfortable for Poe again. Even sealed as it is to keep pressurized, something must have gotten damaged in the crash because a fine mist of abrasive dust has slipped into the stale air. Poe's been breathing his own fumes for who knows how long, and BB-8 must be in even worse shape. He'd gotten the droid back into the astromech socket and covered all of BB-8's exposed parts with a thermal blanket to the best of his ability, but the droid was never really made for this.

Neither is Poe. The storm's gone on for longer than he cares to guess, darkening the sky so much at times that he can't guess at night or day. It's cold, too. Not freezing, but enough to be uncomfortable. Enough to keep him from sleeping through the worst of it.

"When is this going to let up?" he wonders aloud, so he can hear something other than the howl of the wind.

BB-8 reminds him that all of the optical devices possessed are covered. Poe chuckles thinly.

"Don't worry, buddy, you aren't missing much," he assures the droid. Dust has caked his face, sticking in his nostrils and to the moisture on his lips, drying both to cracking.

 _This is almost worse than being a 'guest' on a Star Destroyer._ His canteen - only half full when the storm rolled in - is long since empty. The moisture harvester that he'd jammed between his ankles drags a few drops of Poe's sweat and whatever moisture he's still exhaling out of the air and into the reservoir. Poe tries not to think about it too much. He likes knowing that it's there for the moment that seems the worst.

He guesses this isn't it.

Instead, he leans back as best he can in the small space, looking up through the canopy at the hypnotic swirls of sand. It seems to play tricks on his eyes after a while, and Poe wonders if time is moving forward at all.

"Next time we talk to Rey," Poe says, voice dry and distant even to his own ears. "Remind me to ask her how she survived the _boredom_."

BB-8 agrees, in a short tone that Poe feels a sympathy for.

Poe runs through landing and take-off sequences for every craft he's ever flown, running through the Tie Fighter twice with 'cable release' in the proper order at the front. Next time, he won't miss that step. He thinks even further back to the A-Wing he'd learned on, his hands small on the yoke under his mother's fingers.

Poe closes his eyes to the pounding sands and its winds become the howl of passage through atmo in his thoughts. The rumble and resistance of wind, like nothing else, beneath the foils of his fighter. Those days on Yavin-IV in the lumbering A-Wing, learning to do things with a clumsy ship that he'd later only perfect in the new generation of fighters - are days he hasn't thought of in a while.

He drifts there, almost asleep - though his heart is pounding - until the images refuse to follow a coherent pattern in his thoughts. Irritated, he wakes. The temperature outside is rising. Outside, the air is almost clear at last, exposing patches of pale blue sky and leaving a path for the sun's long reach to touch the X-Wing. Poe's skin is dry, despite the heat. Dimly, he's aware that this isn't a good sign. 

Popping open the canopy dislodges a small mountain of red-brown dust and Poe shakes it clear before he pulls the water capture unit out of the footwell, pouring the three mouthfulls of harvested water down his throat on pure, unstoppable instinct. It hits in his stomach like a fist, more ache than relief.

BB-8 beeps inquiringly at him, and Poe pulls himself up out of the cockpit intent on rebuilding his solar stills if they're damaged. He reaches out to pull the dust-covered blanket off BB-8's dome, and then laboriously pulls the manual release lever to free the droid from the socket, and leaves the difficult process of getting free to BB-8.

"Try and get contact with Rey again as soon as possible," Poe tells the droid, getting an affirmative, and then a sudden alarmed shriek that causes Poe to wheel around.

BB-8 beeps and whistles warningly at a big, shaggy animal, covered in dust and investigating the crash site. It's nosing at the flat panel that Poe had pried out of the interior of Black One and placed over his solar still to protect it. The animal has a long neck, long legs beneath a squarish body, and a blocky unlovely head now pushing aside the heavy rock Poe had used to weigh the cover down. It seems unconcerned with either BB-8's racket or Poe's presence.

Poe heaves himself over the side of the cockpit, grabbing for the blaster rifle holstered inside. Finally, he could eat real food!

He wheels around, lifting the blaster to his shoulder and knowing he has to act quickly to protect his water source. He puts the crosshairs on one shaggy shoulder. His hands are shaking, but he can't miss. The animal isn't moving other than to sniff at the unfamiliar panel with it's blunt nose, likely detecting the water beneath.

Then, in the instant that Poe's finger is tightening on the trigger, the animal looks up at him with sloe, dark eyes, it's soft mouth making a thirsty gesture that presses Poe's heart.

"Him or me," he mutters, trying to convince himself. It doesn't work - the animal isn't even afraid of him. Putting a blaster bolt through a beast that's never seen a human before - it just doesn't seem like something Poe should do.

It's un-neighborly. Besides, what if it has a family somewhere? Poe sighs, lowering the gun. 

The animal flips his cover out of the way and plunges its nose down into the still.

"Hey!" Poe shouts, adding his voice to BB-8's increasing scolding. "Hey! Hey! Get your own!"

He runs toward the animal, waving his hands and the blaster at it. The animal lurches away with a lazy motion, ponderous and powerful, but it's too late. The last of his water drips from its muzzle as it wheels around a few steps away, head and wispy tail lifted.

Poe pulls his tin cup out of the hole, shaking sand off the clear sheet of plasto. He sucks the last few drops of water out of the cup and off the sheet without reservation while the animal watches him attentively. He hopes that whatever it is it doesn't have toxic or disease ridden saliva. _That would be just my luck._

He feels wrung out, desperately thirsty, and yet aware of how precarious his situation is. If he doesn't begin the process of water production now, he'll be too dehydrated for it to matter by the time he has any. His thoughts narrow and focus, but refuse to attain clarity as the sun overhead pours renewed fury down on his neck and back. 

Poe remembers getting the water harvester set up beneath the damaged foils of the X-Wing, and pouring the grisly, bright-yellow contents of the cockpit pittle-pack into the bottom of the solar still, carefully rebuilding it. By the time this is done, he's blazing hot and he drags himself into the shadow of the downed X-wing, grateful for the shade.

Apparently put off by the scent now emanating from the solar still, the animal makes no attempt to raid it a second time before wandering off into the rippling heat of the distance, disappearing like a mirage. BB-8, now free of the socket, chases it for a short time, scolding it with beeps and clucks that impress it no more than Poe's blaster had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Wow this chapter's a bit bigger than I expected.  
> -a 'Pittle-pack' or piddle-pack is how fighter pilots relieve themselves in flight; apparently a hassle to use and the filled receptacle requires careful stowing so as not to slip free and smash itself all over the interior of a cockpit. The more you know! (tm).  
> -In a desert survival situation a solar still can be built by digging a hole and creating a slightly concave surface out of clear plastic (or really any plastic but clear allows you to see through). Beneath the lowest point, place your collection device. Any liquid you need to purify (via evaporation) should go elsewhere in the hole. Be advised you cannot purify antifreeze this way!  
> -Snap Wexley's aside is about Sinjir Rath Velus, from his childhood adventures as can be read in _Star Wars Aftermath_ , written by Chuck Wendig.


	9. Chapter 9

Finn doesn't know what to say when Nien introduces him to Luke Skywalker. He'd never expected to meet the legendary Jedi, map or no map. It doesn't seem real. Finn wouldn't have known Luke Skywalker from anyone else, but he trusts Nien; he has no reason to lie and he was there.

"Luke," Nien says casually - not showing off, Finn thinks, they really are acquainted. "This is Finn. He came to us from the First Order."

Finn feels this is a vast simplification, but explaining is unlikely to matter. Luke Skywalker has escaped the galaxy, almost defying gravity to remain unfound for so long. What does it matter to him that by the method of Finn's escape he'd also saved Poe Dameron (and then in turn, been saved by Poe and Rey themselves?)

"It's nice to meet you, uh, sir," Finn says, uncertain how it's proper to address _the_ Luke Skywalker. "What can we do for you?"

He's not sure that it would be impolite to ask him - _Luke Skywalker_ \- if Rey is there with him.

"I was just telling Nien that you aren't all that far from here," Luke explains. His voice seems rusty, but personable. Finn expected something different - some booming authority, perhaps. "We could use ride back to your base."

Finn glances at Nien. The _Mellcrawler II_ is his ship, after all.

"The last time I gave someone in your family 'a ride'," Nien says - in Sullustan, but there's a translation scrolling across the bottom of the holo-comm screen. "Is the reason why there's a 'II' appended onto the name of my ship."

Finn is appalled - shock by the casual teasing when they've found the man that half the galaxy is looking for. But, Luke actually smiles - the ghost of a man less haunted.

"That was my sister," he reminds. 

"I wouldn't mistake you for her, I assure you," Nien says. "We _can_ give you a ride, only..."

Finn puts in, "we're actually on a mission."

He doesn't know how much more he should say. Maybe nothing, but he feels compelled to explain himself anyway.

"We're looking for someone. A Resistance member. He could be in danger," Finn says.

Luke turns his attention to Finn slowly, considering. His gaze isn't quite the daunting stare of career officers like he'd seen in the First Order, but it looks depthless with some wisdom that leaves Luke profoundly sad. 

"You're looking for that pilot," Luke guesses.

Finn's hopes surge. "Is he there with you?"

The question comes out before Finn can check himself. Surely if Poe is there, Luke would use his name. As if confirming Finn's thoughts, Luke shakes his head. His hopes sink - it was too much to ask that the universe did him the favor of leaving Poe someplace safe and in friendly company.

Rey's voice intrudes. "We know where he is, though."

Her familiar face leans into the frame, crowding Luke out for a moment.

"Rey!" Finn greets, his heart swelling up with affection. She looks bright, confident. Brilliant, in contrast to Luke's old glow. She smiles at him, eyes gleaming with the expression.

Finn beams uncontrollably back, not feeling alone in the universe anymore. "You look great!"

"You too," she tells him, with a soft affection that says she's worried. "And it's good to hear your voice again."

Poe had told Finn that she'd come to the infirmary to say goodbye, and to promise to see him again, but he remembers something else, too.

"I felt like you were there when I woke up..." Finn says.

"I'll tell you all about it on the ride back, but first you should get Poe..." she reminds, and it brings Finn back to the task at hand.

"Right. Is he safe?" Finn asks, remembering his worry. "Do you know where we can find him?"

"Last I knew, he was okay," Rey assures him. "He's on a desert planet and Artoo can only get through to BeeBee-Ate sometimes because of the sandstorms there."

"Sandstorms?" Finn asks, a thrill sliding up his spine. He doesn't bother to temper his excitement. "We're there! We're right _there_!"

Rey smiles. "Good, then you can go get him before you pick us up."

Finn's glad she's the one who says it. He'd hate to have to tell Luke Skywalker that he's the second priority, and the thought of what General Organa would say still leaves him second-guessing the idea.

"It won't take too long," Finn promises.

Rey doesn't bother to confirm that it's okay with Luke, but Finn glances at him over Rey's shoulder and the Jedi gives him a patient nod, once. Finn feels immensely grateful.

"And Finn," Rey adds, more seriously. "You have to make sure he drinks _slowly_ for the first little while, okay?"

Old training - basic First Aid he'd learned when he was pretty young - kicks in to tell him that extreme dehydration has to be handled somewhat carefully. Rey looks pretty serious about it, too. Finn nods. 

"Okay."

"See you soon," she says.

"Yeah," Finn says, warmly, as it finally starts to seem real that he _will_ \- he'll see Rey and Poe again very soon.

-

Something drags Poe up from the depths of his unconsciousness like a slow riptide dragging him back to the surface. His back hurts and his head is pounding, his mouth a dry, dusty agony. There is something gentle at his neck; a soft, wet caress that his slowly waking mind tries to quantify. With great effort - though Poe wants little more than to go back to sleep - he tries to put together the clues to how he has gotten here.

Experience tells him that this is a hangover - a hellish one. The insistent touches now moving up the side of his face suggests he didn't make all of the previous night's bad decisions by himself. Now if only he can remember enough not to completely embarrass himself. A warm, heavy blast of air hits Poe dead in the face, and then he realizes something isn't quite right with the scenario he's building.

First, he's sitting up on something hard instead of safe in his bunk on his soft bed. Second, the right side of his face feels raw and tightly drawn. Third, he's had some pretty wild adventures sexually (the thought drags up a battered and aching pride, even now), but he's never wound up in bed afterward with something that could nuzzle both sides of his neck without moving.

"Hey," he croaks, in a voice that's dry and weak. He opens his eyes, trying for humor - he needn't bother. What greets him is a pair of curious, long nosed creatures - like the one who had stolen his water earlier. Their arched necks are extended into the space beneath the wing of Black One, perhaps hoping for more liquid.

"You brought a friend," Poe says, unable to muster anything but the weakest surprise. His mouth is gummy, lips cracking. The inside of it tastes like the red dust he's sitting on.

The animal whuffs another blast of air against Poe's tender skin - sunburnt on one side, he thinks, from sitting to close to one side of the S-Foil. It doesn't really mean anything in his thoughts. The world has a fuzzy, dim quality.

"Sorry fellas, time to get up," Poe says, dragging himself up off the ground and startling them back - they jerk away, their cream and sand colored coats flashing in the moonlight and scold him with strange looping cough noises that seem more suited to geese than animals of their size. 

He has no idea what time it is, but the air is significantly cooler. He's also, with the exception of the two curious animals, alone.

"BeeBee-Ate?" Poe calls, surprised the droid hadn't woken him up. His limbs feel simultaneously as if they are made of lead and glass. Unsturdy and _heavy_. He reaches up to readjust the makeshift sling holding his splinted arm around his chest to try and relieve some of the pressure on the back of his neck, then stoops with great effort and picks up the thermal blanket from the cracked soil.

He sees no sign of BB-8 as he pulls it around his shoulders. Even this small effort has taxed him. He recognizes the signs of exhaustion, dehydration, hypoglycemia. The rations have run out, and even if he still had any, Poe thinks they'd be too dry to eat without any extra water. His splinted arm aches, too, in slow dull throbs like his head.

Leaning against the side of Black One, Poe looks out over the endless sea of long golden grasses and red earth and indulges in one very small, childish fit.

"I want to go home!" he tells the pair of strange animals. He'd stomp his foot if he felt like he wouldn't unbalance himself doing it. The animals rotate their small, triangular ears toward him, bottle-brush tails switching slowly against their flanks as they watch him sink back down to the sand, defeated. 

_I wonder if they're going to eat me after I die?_ The thought strikes him as morbidly funny, and Poe manages a dry, coughing laugh that's half a sob. Well, he'd almost eaten one of them. It'd be a fitting end to two weeks on a desert planet. It's not what Poe has pictured when he's considered the possibility of death or sacrifice for his cause.

_This doesn't even involve a respectable explosion,_ Poe thinks nonsensically. He looks out over the landscape, leaning against the side of the X-Wing like a drowning man(how he wishes, at this second) holds to cordwood. The world seems softer and less hostile at night. Cold, and his body is barely generating heat and shaking anyway, but still gentler somehow. Pale and quiet, the waving grass no longer gold but silver-white like moonlight. _Does it take the color from the sky like the ocean?_

His thoughts seem to wander like the breeze through the plains, rippling waves through the grasses to complete the illusion of water. Poe is very, very thirsty. His thoughts are slow, but focused. Narrow; a whetted knifes edge of clarity in his mind that he can turn on one thing at a time while the rest muddles and twists out of his grasp.

There is a thin track in the grass leading away south, one small sign of BB-8's passage. Maybe, frantic with worry, the droid had tried to find help here. Maybe the heat has done something to the delicate internals, causing an imbalance somewhere. 

Poe follows the line of the track to the gently rolling hills, knowing from his first days that there is a valley beyond, between him and the far distant mountains. He sees motion at the top of the rise. At first he dismisses it as another one of the animals, but then the pair grazing in the grass nearby lift their heads and go stiff with surprise.

One whoops a query in a tone that warns Poe of its fear; the other stomps a forefoot in an agitated signal. Is it a predator? Poe's hardly in any condition to fight for his life. The two animals flee, whooping in alarm, and then Poe sees BB-8 coming down the rise at full tilt and his apprehension raises. He reaches up and grabs the step up under the cockpit of Black One, dragging himself back up to his feet. 

A figure comes over the hill after BB-8, bipedal and not outfitted in obvious First Order regalia. Relief floods Poe like a tide, though he feels too weak to contain it. He braces himself against the side of the X-Wing, holding onto the blanket and the ship with one hand and raising the other over his head as high and steady as possible to extend his first and second fingers in the universal sign of victory. 

"Poe!" Finn's voice carries through the quiet night air and the light from his flashlight trains on Poe, momentarily blinding him. A relieved sob eases out of Poe's chest, a single bark of sound that he clamps down on before it turns into a torrent of mad noise.

The light is on him for long enough that Poe has almost convinced himself he's gone blind and hallucinated the whole thing when it suddenly drops and then Finn is there, real and solid and catching Poe up in a tooth-rattling embrace that makes Poe feel safe and warm - and also a bit like he's little more than a loose collection of bones, one of which is still healing!

It takes him nearly completely off his feet, but Poe catches his arms around Finn's neck and hangs on. 

"You're okay," Finn says - Poe's not sure if he's reassuring Poe or himself, or both of them.

Poe is _not_ going to pass out in Finn's arms. He refuses to let himself, even dizzy and exhausted as he is.

"Yeah," he croaks, sore throat and dry mouth and all while his lips split around his smile and his heart hammers and his vision spins and Finn holds him up. "I'm okay now, buddy."

He doesn't, to his credit, _completely_ faint. Just whites out a little.

-

Luke Skywalker watches the sky, eyes on the stars that have grown familiar to him over the years, and hopes he's judged correctly. He feels uncertain of his own ability, of the changes he's allowed between his own training - which has always felt fragile and inadequate and yet has served him through the many and varied threats to his life. Better than the old ways he's tried to adhere to, since.

These had failed him at the New Jedi Order, undermined by the slow, seductive whisperings of Snoke. By the coming of the Knights of Ren and Luke's weakness.

They need something new. The old ways called the ghosts of the enemies of those ancient paths. They are interconnected, Luke sees know, the concepts intertwined until the last remaining bastions of either are gone. He is one such withering pier out in the harbor of the universe, and on the other side, Snoke reaching out with the desperation and patience of the last of a dying species.

Luke knows the strategy: wear out his enemies. Strike constantly. Never let them rest. Always be ready.

There's only one answer. He'll hold his own strike until the weakness was fully exposed. And then, in that moment, he can't _miss_.

-

Rey tries to remain patient. It's her own fault that she's come down to the beach where the Resistance ship would land well before the ship would be there. But, wherever Luke is, R2-D2 is right there next to her.

"You're eager to get back too?" she asks.

R2-D2's methods of communication differ significantly from other astromech droids she's met, but over the weeks - months? - she's grown used to it. R2-D2 affirms her observation with an unnecessary flourish. Then, a pause and a small admission.

"You miss See-Threepio?" she is a little surprised.

R2-D2 utters a curt warning buzz.

"I won't tell him, don't worry," she says, rocking back on her heels. "I hate being left behind, too."

In the sky, illuminated by the first touches of dawn, she can see the silver streak of the ship entering atmosphere. Luke said it is the _Mellcrawler II_ , whatever significance that has. 

The noise R2 answers her with is the droid equivalent of a raspberry.

"That's not nice to say," she laughs, in spite of herself.

"Artoo doesn't usually pay a lot of attention to 'nice'," Luke's voice calls from behind her. 

Reluctantly, she takes her eyes off the ship and turns to find him cloaked, but otherwise empty handed. Rey knows he carries a lightsaber of his own making beneath it.

"I thought you'd be packing," she says, hoping - _surely after all this he can't be meaning to stay._ He has to be coming with her.

"I won't need anything from here where we're going," he assures her, easing her fears. "It will be here waiting if..."

He hesitates, looking out over the ocean as the _Mellcrawler II_ approaches, but he doesn't finish the sentence. The ship is a small freighter; smaller even than the _Falcon_ , which Chewbacca had taken to begin repairs and an overhaul on when it was apparent that Luke intended to train Rey here.

She knows Finn is on it - and she _hopes_ that her senses are telling her right, that Poe and BB-8 are there as well. The excited fluttering in her stomach makes it hard for her to read the condition of the occupants through the force.

"He'll be okay," Luke assures her vaguely, infuriatingly apt, as the ship angles to make a landing. He always knows.

A sudden question occurs to her, sprung from an earlier conversation about helping her friends, but she has no time to ask it now.

Landing gear springs out from the underside of the ship and it settles down with delicacy on the sand, the gangway unfolding before it's even fully on the ground. 

"Rey!" Finn's excited voice reaches her, as his familiar form springs free of the ship, bounding enthusiastically across the rocky shore. 

By the time she remembers she's supposed to be a Jedi now - a paragon of control - she's met him halfway, wrapped in his solid embrace with her arms around his broad shoulders as he hoists her into the air in a motion that matches the elation of her heart to see him whole and awake and finally _there_. She presses her cheek against Finn's and holds on tight, until it feels real. _They came back for her._

-


	10. Chapter 10

"Did you find him?" Rey asks him, with her arms still tight around Finn's neck. 

He keeps his own around her middle - if anything she seems _smaller_ , yet she still seems to fill his hold with an amazing reserve of strength. Finn nods.

"He's - well, he'll be okay, but he should be in a Bacta tank as fast as possible," Finn assures her.

"It's not as bad as all that," a voice croaks from behind them.

Rey leans back, taking in Poe standing at the top of the gangway and leaning somewhat less than casually against the bulkhead of the ship. To Finn's surprise she pulls away, intent on greeting Poe with as much enthusiasm. Poe tries to protest - some excuse about his unshaven and barely-washed state. She grabs him anyway, thumping him on the back hard enough to make Poe wince.

His good arm goes around her shoulders, too, and Finn realizes that between his time in the infirmary and losing Poe this last time, something's changed. For all three of them, maybe.

Rey, he notices, doesn't hang onto Poe for very long. A sonic shower had taken the edge off, but some things require real running water.

"Uh," Finn says, suddenly remembering there are other passengers. "I'm, uh - Finn."

But when he turns back to the beach, the Jedi master is already passing him, patting Rey companionably on the shoulder as he steps aboard the _Mellcrawler II_. 

"Are you coming, Finn?" Rey calls from the top of the ramp, smiling at him. R2-D2 whistles cheerfully at Finn as he passes him too, rolling on board.

"Guess so," Finn says, taking one last look at the vast expanse of the oceans around them before he gets back onto the ship, knowing it's going to be a cramped but companionable journey back to the base. 

Luke and R2-D2 head into the cockpit, and Finn thinks it's best to give them time to catch up with Nien Nunb - he has some catching up of his own he wants to do. There's no space anywhere except for the cramped crew quarters he's been assigned, but they all fit carefully inside.

"What's all the equipment?" Rey asks, seated on the floor in the small space between the end of the bunk and the clothes locker. Poe, exhausted even from the short walk to and from the gangplank, is stretched out on the bed. He looks out of place in Finn's oversized sweat pants and a hand-me-down sweater top, but his flight suit had been un-salvageable. There's a slightly better cast on his damaged - broken, but mending - arm. 

Rey, on the other hand, looks just as radiant as she had before Kylo Ren had taken her.

"It's good to see both of you again," Finn says, honestly.

Poe smiles, though it's almost lost under his ragged beard.

"I missed you too," Rey confesses, but she beams brightly and pats the open space at the end of the bunk mattress for Finn to sit, where he'll be between them.

When he does, she leans against his knees. Finn is surprised by the contact, but he likes it.

"So how'd you find me, buddy?" Poe asks, shifting to press his own knees against Finn's back. Touching both of them, comfortable and safe for whatever moments they have, feels right.

"Well, we looked really hard - that's what all the equipment is for," Finn explains. "We guessed, in all honesty. Took our best shot based on how much fuel you had and where we knew you were last headed. So what _I_ wanna know is how _you_ knew where Poe was."

He directs the last at Rey.

"That's easy," she says. Then, mischievously, "Jedi trick."

Poe laughs. "BeeBee-Ate's signal couldn't get far, but Artoo could pick it up when the storms let up enough."

She tips her head, begrudgingly accepting the answer as the truth over her own more mystical explanation. 

"The storms!" Finn realizes, catching both their attentions. "That's why BeeBee-Ate's signal was so infrequent."

It feels good to have that piece of the puzzle, even if it hardly matters now.

Rey nods. "I could only get through some of the time."

"Good thing you did," Poe adds. "Or I never would have made it long enough for Finn to come get me. I had to face down wild animals, you know."

"It was a pretty close call," Finn agrees, leaning back against Poe's legs. "He sure _smelled_ like it was too late."

Poe groans, reaching for his cup of water as if even the _memory_ is enough to make him thirsty again. It's alright, that's why Finn can joke about it. Poe's going to be okay this time. And, Finn realizes, next time. Any time Finn has anything to say about it.

That's the difference between the First Order and the Resistance. The ability to do what Finn's heart says is the right thing. Right now, he knows he has by the warm glow he feels to see both of his friends together.

-

Poe's nerves try to choke him as he showers - a _real_ shower, back on base, the water running over his skin hot just shy of painful. He refuses to think of it as a waste. The desert is behind him, and Poe has spent enough time in a bacta tank that he's left the cast behind, too.

The habits are a little harder to set aside. He gulps water, covets it. Yesterday, when Rey had sipped from his cup as they'd all sat talking, he'd had to fight down the urge to pull it back to him protectively. She'd given him a knowing look, but drank anyway, asserting her dominance in a casual way. It made Poe's heart pound. At the time, it was a good thing, but now it's almost an anxious feeling.

He has to admit how he feels to Finn. The issue is that how he feels is complicated. He runs the scenario through his head over and over as he rinses the last of the slimy, persistent Bacta fluid out of his hair.

The electric razor has at least made short work of the ragged beard, leaving Poe more or less himself again. Clean - or he will be when he's done scouring himself - he thinks his - _offer? proposition?_ \- will at least have some chance of a good reception. 

Really, his best chance. 

So why does it feel like he has no hope?

"You have to come out of there sometime," a voice intrudes, startling Poe so he drops the bottle of shampoo. 

He's used to the base's dorm-style shower, the stalls shut off in individual frosted glass boxes but still communal. He doesn't, at least, have to worry about his modesty. Too much.

"Ah," Poe says suddenly coldly nervous in spite of the hot water. "General, I-"

"Save it," she says, leaning in the entryway. He can see her form distorted through the waved glass. Leia's tone brooks no argument. "I came down to debrief you at our scheduled time, _half an hour ago_..."

Poe's blood runs colder still. He forgot! How could he have forgotten? _How have I been in the shower that long?_

"And Commander Finn told me you were still in the shower," Leia continues.

" _Commander_ Finn?" Poe asks, surprised enough to interrupt her, forgetting his place.

"Not as quickly as _you_ made Commander, I know," Leia reminds him. "But he was instrumental in one or two important missions, and the Resistance prides itself on recognizing its assets."

Poe gives up on the idea of properly washing his hair and turns off the water. Opening the stall door just enough to snake his hand through the opening, he grabs his towel from the nearby shelf. 

Leia continues, unphased, "besides, this way you two are the same rank."

She lets that statement stand without further elaboration, before continuing, "Now, I know you're apologetic for nearly destroying a second X-Wing in less time than it takes most of my pilots to go through a set of coveralls..."

"I went through one of those too," Poe says apologetically, rubbing the towel vigorously through his hair while still behind the protective glass.

"Mmm-hmm," Leia agrees. "But that's not the sort of thing I expect Poe Dameron to try and drown himself in the shower over."

"No," Poe says, falling into the swing of the conversation. "It's not that. I mean, I _am_ sorry about the X-Wing but..."

Leia waits while he ties the towel around his waist - a little higher and a lot more securely than he usually does, and swings the stall door open to face his General. It's easier to face her in his bath towel than it is to go admit what he wants to to his friends. He likes the distraction.

"I should be able to repair Black One," he promises, " with enough time."

"Mmm-hmm," she says. "I've got Bollie and his ground crew working on it already. Not that they need any more work."

"Yes ma'am," Poe says. "I take your point."

"You're grounded," Leia informs him cheerfully.

"What-"

Leia waves off the protest. "Controller Dand came directly to me. I can't make an exception and dismiss his concerns. You switched hyperspace lanes while you were _in_ hyperspace?"

Poe tips his head, too proud of the achievement to bother trying to deny it - especially after describing it triumphantly in front of half a dozen squad-mates.

"Way outside protocol," Leia scolds him, smiling.

"Well, it worked," Poe says.

"Something tells me you're not much for protocol," she says, giving him a knowing look.

"How long have I lost my wings for, General?" Poe asks, finding it important to know for some reason.

"Fourteen standard cycles, or until Black One is repaired. Whichever comes first," Leia tells him. 

Poe winces. "That long?"

Leia gives him a stern look, and Poe stops trying to charm his way out of his punishment while standing there in a bath towel. He's no match for her determination.

"Next time you deploy you are _not_ to break one of my X-Wings. Is that clear, Commander Dameron?"

Poe nods, drawing up straight into a salute. He can't help but hold onto the top of his towel at the small of his back, just in case.

She softens, just a little. "Good job, Commander. It's good to have you back."

"You'll have to thank Rey and Finn - _Commander_ Finn - for that, ma'am," Poe says, formally.

"I have," she says, in a flat tone. "And BeeBee-Ate, too."

Poe supposes that to mean she's done with him and that he's dismissed. He reaches for the pile of clean clothes, eager to be back in his own, but Leia doesn't go.

"So," she says. "What _does_ have my best pilot hiding in the showers?"

He'd hoped she would forget that subject. It brings all his concerns right to the forefront again as he considers it.

"I want something," he says at last. "But I'm afraid of asking for it. What if I do it wrong, what if they don't understand..."

Leia snorts. "Is _that_ all."

Poe could admit, it's a little silly. It still seems big. Like, _the-rest-of-his-life_ big, and until now, Poe's avoided any such commitments. Then again, this one might be worth it.

"Look, Commander," Leia breaks into his thoughts. She corrects herself, speaking informally now, "Poe. Life is short. Don't make it kick down your door for something you want anyway."

Poe nods.

Leia turns to go, and then stops. She looks back over her shoulder. "I spoke to Kes and let him know we found you."

Poe meant to call his father soon. He's glad that Leia has broken the ice, if word about Poe's latest adventures has reached all the way back to Yavin-IV.

Leia measures time for effect, then adds. "From what he said, congratulations are in order."

Poe could hit himself. _I told Dad about Finn!_ Leia grins at him then, wickedly, and leaves him to get dressed.

-

BB-8 rolls carefully up the stairs to the crew quarters, taking each elevation with a careful application of balance and pressure. It takes a lot of the droid's focus.

BB-8 has the final damage report for Black One, now that the X-Wing is recovered and returned to the hanger. It's talking gibberish at the moment - too many crossed wires and overheated connections inside, but BB-8 coaxed a full systems analysis out of it, and knows Poe will want the results right away.

He always wants to repair his ship as fast as possible, and just like when he repairs BB-8, he'll want to do it himself. BB-8 likes that about Poe, likes that he takes care of his droid and his X-Wing, rendering each unique. 

BB-8 is happy to take care of Poe in return. At the top of the stairs, the droid glances either direction for anyone else, and then turns down the hall towards their quarters.

Strangely, Princess Leia exits the shower rooms at the end of the hall, with C-3PO shuffling after her. 

"Oh, BeeBee-Ate," C-3PO greets. "We've just come from-"

Leia cuts in, "are you going to see Commander Dameron?"

BB-8 affirms politely. 

"Skip it," she tells BB-8. "He's got a lot on his mind."

BB-8 protests - the damage reports! If repairs begin right away...

Leia stops BB-8. She actually crouches down and puts a hand on the droid's side. "Trust me, I think he has to finish a couple of things before you give him any more excuse to procrastinate."

BB-8 queries.

"Well, I think he's going to need to work out a few things," she says, "and if it goes anything like 'working things out' went for me, a little privacy is in order."

She stands up. "Why don't you come with me. I already got Bollie started on repairs but you can help me get a few more people involved."

BB-8 rolls after her, explaining.

"I know he likes to do things himself, but sometimes there are just too many things to do with your own two hands," she explains, leading BB-8 and C-3PO back the way they came. "It's easy, when you're caught up in the fervor of the Resistance, to prioritized repairs over yourself."

Repairs are important, BB-8 knows. They can make a lot of difference when things got tight. 

 

"You're right," Leia explains, " but looking after himself is just as important. Let me tell you a few things."

BB-8 tries to focus on her words as well as navigate the delicate process of going back down the stairs.

-

"So?" Rey asks, sitting on Poe's bunk like she owns it, looking at him in clear expectation. "Are you ready?"

Poe had walked in ready, hair still wet from the shower, skin cool from evaporating water, but he flushes up hot. Nervous. Rey sees right through him, giving him an exasperated look.

"Ready for what?" Finn asks, from behind Poe.

He's _surrounded_.

"Ready," Rey says, forging on, and even though Poe _isn't_ he resolves himself to it. "To tell you how we feel about you."

Finn looks curious when Poe turns around. He can't just let Rey do it for him. He's too old for the schoolyard version. He lifts his hands toward Finn, palms up, and without hesitation Finn puts both his own hands in Poe's. Brown fingers curl over his own, warm and reassuring.

Poe suddenly feels both calm and way more serious than he intended. A crazy moment of spinning vertigo.

"I really adore you," he says, without thinking about it. 

He thinks Finn blushes. Rey's small hands appear at Finn's sides, then wrap around his middle. "I also adore you."

Finn doesn't seem to know what to say.

"Right," Poe agrees. "How _we_ feel about you."

"We were thinking," Rey continues, "That we should both tell you together, because then we can work something out all three of us."

Finn looks over his shoulder at Rey, then back at Poe. Poe tries for an encouraging smile.

"Okay," Finn says at last. Poe can see him trying to work things through.

"Okay? Buddy," Poe says, with a nervous chuckle. "We need a little more than 'okay'."

Finn gives him a bright, beautiful smile and reaches back for Rey's hand. She steps around next to Poe, and her small hand takes his empty one and squeezes. Poe guesses this is a pretty good start. Finn hasn't said 'but I like Rey' or 'I don't feel that way'. Poe's next call to his father might get a little complicated.

"Okay," Finn repeats. "What do we do now?" 

Rey laughs and reaches up to put her hands around his neck in a tight hug. She pulls Poe in and he wonders what he was ever afraid of. 

Between the three of them, they can fly anything. The rest is just figuring out how to land.

-

The End.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be more in this universe, however as the fic was about to make a jump from T to Mature or Explicit, I thought I would split it into a second part - since changing the rating fairly dramatically won't change the rating of the fic that people started reading. Thanks so much for coming along on this ride with me! Hope to see you in the next part. :)

**Author's Note:**

> -Second Circle is a reference to a Russian pilot superstition, where any landing circle after the first is referred to as a second circle, irregardless of if it's the 3rd or the 5th.  
> -Several references in this throughout to canon sources other than the movie; Iolo and Kare for example, as well as the description of Poe's Yacht adventure recall back to _Before the Awakening_ , his parents are covered in _Shattered Empire_ , and it's likely that I'll reference the novelization's ( _The Force Awakens_ ) extra information at some point.  
> -I can't promise a regular update schedule but I seem pretty inspired so hopefully this will continue to collect itself quickly into chapters. As it is a work in progress - tags, ratings, & etc may change unexpectedly.  
> -find me on tumblr @ shawarma_palace


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